Hitting the line

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“Think Charley would see him?” asked Jimmy doubtfully.

“Why not? Go to his house if he isn’t at the office. If there’s anything I can do, Crail, look me up. I’m in Trow; Number 16. Jimmy’ll show you.”

Monty thanked him, and the talk wandered to other subjects; such as who was coming back, and who wasn’t, the rumored changes in the faculty, the prospects for the football team, and what progress had been made by the squad that, following a custom of several years’ duration, had been practising at Grafton for the last week. Pete explained his absence from the preliminary session. He had spent the summer in the Southwest with a surveying party, and had only finished his work five days before. Evidently, the hardships, some of which he jokingly alluded to, had agreed with him, for the big fellow looked as hard as nails, and wore the complexion of a Comanche Indian. Monty Crail listened politely, and in silence for the most part, dividing his attention between his companions and the landscape moving leisurely past the window. Needham Junction is only four miles from Grafton, but the train doesn’t hurry, and somehow usually manages to consume the better part of twenty minutes on the journey, making five stops at cross-roads stations, and lingering socially at each. There were few other Grafton students amongst the passengers sprinkled through the car, for the train that Jimmy and Dud had selected was not a favorite with the fellows. The real influx would occur later in the afternoon when the two expresses came in. Dud and Jimmy had chosen to arrive early for the reason that they were to have a new room this fall, and there would be some work to be accomplished before they would be fairly settled.

Monty viewed the country with favor. It was all very different from both Indiana and Wyoming. There was a softness and a peacefulness that were attractive, and which, in spite of novelty, seemed to the boy very homelike. Only once before had he been in the east, and that had been when he was nine years of age, and his father had taken him on a hurried trip to Washington and New York. Monty couldn’t remember many of the details of that visit nor much of the places he had seen. As he recalled it now, much of the time had been spent by him awaiting his father in hotel rooms. From the train window his gaze fell on restful, still, green meadows, outlined by stone walls, on patches of woodland, on squatty white farmhouses that seemed rather to have grown than been built, on distant hills, hazy blue in the afternoon light, on fields of corn and blue-green cabbages, and potatoes and golden pumpkins.

Everything was very different, even the trees and the fences, and the faces he glimpsed at the little stations, but there was no feeling of loneliness in Monty. He was used to strange scenes, used to being by himself and looking after himself. Even before his father had died—he remembered nothing at all of his mother—he had been left a good deal to his own devices, and since then he had fended entirely for himself, for Mr. Holman, his guardian, attempted to exercise but slight control over the boy. Monty was practically incapable of ever being homesick, for the simple reason that for five years he had had no real home, spending his summers as it pleased him, usually at Windlass City, sometimes on a ranch, and his winters in or around Terre Haute. What had bothered him most the winter before, at Dunning Academy, had been the “staying put,” as he called it. Accustomed to moving about as, and when he pleased, being tied to a few acres had proved a new and unpleasant experience. Just now he was wondering whether he could accustom himself to similar conditions this winter. He meant to try hard, for here he was sixteen years old and with less “book-learning” than most fellows two years younger, and he realized that if he was to get an education he must buckle down to it, and restrain those restless feet of his. He didn’t want to grow up an ignoramus. And then, too, Dunning had given him a taste for the companionship of persons of his own age, something he had enjoyed but little. Until he had gone to the military school his friends and acquaintances had been, with few exceptions, men; Joe Coolidge, the mine superintendent; “Snub” Thompson, “Tejon” Burns, Garry Waters, who ranched on Little Horse Creek, “Soapy” Baker, of the Meeteetse outfit, and a few more commonplace and less picturesque gentlemen in Terre Haute. Monty had begun to feel the need of boy friends and boy interests, and perhaps it was as much that need as a desire for knowledge that had led him to fall in so readily with his guardian’s suggestion. So far as making his way in the world was concerned, Monty might have gone along with no more knowledge of Ancient and Modern Languages, higher mathematics, and the rest of the curriculum, than he possessed, for Mr. Crail had left a good-sized fortune in trust for the boy, and the Gros Ventre Coal Company, under present management, was doing better than ever, and that Monty would ever have to work for a living if he didn’t want to was inconceivable.

When he had said that he had decided to go to Grafton instead of Mount Morris, because it was nearer he had spoken only part of the truth. The chief reason had been that he had found in Jimmy and Dud a hint of the companionship he craved. An uneventful journey east and a night spent alone in a New York hotel had left him ready to make friends with almost anyone of his kind on slight provocation. He was always able to amuse himself very satisfactorily for awhile, as witness his efforts with the news vendor, the information bureau man and the conductor, but that sort of fooling palled eventually, and having made the acquaintance of Jimmy and Dud he felt it the part of wisdom to continue it. He might, he told himself, speaking from experience gained at Dunning, remain at Mount Morris a month before he would get on such friendly footing with anyone. And already he had increased his circle of acquaintances by one more, he thought, glancing appreciatively at Pete Gowen’s homely and kindly face, and that was doing pretty well. He had come east prepared for hard sledding in the matter of making friends, for he had heard all his life of the Easterner’s aloofness, but here, with scarcely an effort, he was already in possession of three—well, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances! If, he said to himself as the engine announced the end of its leisurely journey by a shrill whistle, the rest of the Grafton fellows were as human and likeable as the three he had so far encountered he was going to like the place fine!

A minute or two later they were out on the platform, bags in hand. And a minute later still they were, all four, together with nine other lads, settled in the queer vehicle that Jimmy called a “barge.” The barge was long and open all around, and had seats running lengthwise, seats upholstered in faded crimson plush. There was a crosswise seat in front for the aged driver, and the vehicle was drawn by a pair of likely-looking gray horses. Although the two long seats were designed to accommodate some two dozen passengers, thirteen boys and thirteen bags, with a sprinkling of golf-bags, tennis rackets, cameras and overcoats, used about all the space. The road did not enter the town of Grafton, but skirted it, and almost before Monty had begun to entertain any curiosity as to the school itself the barge swung around a corner into River Street, and the buildings and the campus were before him.

Dud, sitting beside him with his suitcase on his knees that Monty might have room for his kit-bag on the floor, pointed out the buildings. “That’s Lothrop, the one ahead there, nearest the street. Jimmy and I room there this year. It’s the best of the lot. Trow’s behind it. The next is School Hall, and Manning’s the last in the row. The gymnasium is back of Manning, but you can’t see it yet. The frame house at the other side of the campus, behind the trees, is Doctor Duncan’s. He’s the principal, you know.”

Monty listened and looked with interest. As the barge rolled down the freshly sprinkled macadamized street, through alternating patches of sunlight and shadow, he looked under the branches of the bordering maples and saw a wide expanse of turf across which marched a row of brick buildings, the newer ones graced with limestone trimming, the older one, School Hall this, saved from monotony only by the ivy that clothed its lower story. Gravel paths, shaded by tall elm trees, led across the turf, and a wide walk of red brick ran from one side of the campus to the other in front of the buildings. A fence of roughly squared granite posts connected by timbers enclosed the grounds. Further away, in the direction of the river whose existence Dud dwelt on, a second smoothly paved street proceeded at right angles with the one they were on, and beyond that was a second and narrower stretch of turf—“the Green,” Dud called it—with two comfortable, immaculately white dwellings nestling on the nearer corner of it. “Morris and Fuller Houses,” said Dud, waving a hand toward them. “They’re dormitories, too. Small ones. Some fellows like them, but I never thought I should. The Field’s on the other side. You can see the grandstand if you look quick.”

But Monty failed, for just then the barge turned in at the carriage gate, and the trees closed in on his view.