Hitting the line

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Bonner, Monty gathered, was the coach, a middle-sized man of just under thirty, alert and quick, with a peremptory voice and a settled scowl. Or, at least, Monty concluded that the scowl was settled until “Dinny” Crowley, the assistant athletic director, had tossed a word to him in passing, and the coach’s face had lighted with a smile that chased the scowl away, and made Monty smile in sympathy. Practice was not very interesting that afternoon. Only the fact that nothing more exciting offered itself kept the spectators there until the squads were sent back to the field house. After that, Jimmy had suggested walking to the river, and they had done so, and Monty had had his first sight of a canoe in actual use, and had mentally registered a vow to become the proud possessor of one at the earliest possible opportunity, and spend all his spare time paddling up and down the little stream.

Still later, he had joined the Morris House fellows on the steps before the supper time, and, without taking much part in the talk, had in a way established himself as one of the crowd. Of the eleven youths, who, with Monty, made up the roster at Morris, seven were what Monty unflatteringly termed “Indians.” Monty would have had some difficulty in explaining just what he meant by the term, but it satisfied him. Perhaps when we remember that in the neighborhood of Windlass City, Wyoming, the noble Red Man is not held in high regard we may form a fair estimate of the seven. Further light is shed by the fact that Monty secretly dubbed Alvin Standart a “Digger.” I believe that the Digger Indian is considered especially low caste and subsists principally on such luxuries as wild roots!

Monty’s verdict regarding the seven was hasty, and later he revised it with regard to several of them. It is a mistake to judge others on the evidence of a day’s acquaintance, and so Monty found it.

After supper he had climbed to the room, Standart being out, and had seated himself in the chair, and propped his feet comfortably, if inelegantly, on the sill to think things over. He decided that he was going to like Grafton School; that, on the whole, he was glad he had substituted it for Mount Morris; that he would have to do some hard studying if he was to secure that promotion in January; that he would certainly “have a stab at it”; that Alvin Standart was a most undesirable roommate, but would have to be made the best of; and that if he got a chance to show this eastern bunch how to play tackle or guard, why, they’d learn something!

The evening sky grew a deeper blue. Somewhere afar off in the direction of the town a light glowed wanly. The air that entered the open window still held the heat of the sun, and, while fresher than before supper, gave no promise of a cool night. Sitting indoors until bedtime did not appeal to Monty, but neither did joining the crowd outside on the steps. He would have looked up Dud and Jimmy again, but didn’t want them to think that he meant to fasten himself on them for the rest of the school year. He supposed that it would be all right to pay a visit to Gowen, but Gowen’s invitation might have been more polite than sincere, and Monty still clung to his belief that easterners were stand-offish and resentful of anything that looked like “butting-in.” But not going over to Lothrop was not, after all, a great deprivation, for, while Monty liked Dud and Jimmy, and was grateful to them for their friendship, they did not fill the want that he felt. Dud and Jimmy had each other, and although they always made him feel that he was welcome, still he realized that he was by no means essential to their happiness, and that what liking they had for him was, so far at least, due to the fact that he was a bit different from the run of the fellows they knew, and that he amused them. What Monty really wanted was a chum of his own, someone he could talk to about the little, intimate things of life, someone who would like him because he was just Monty Crail, and not merely because he was “western” and amusing. It would, he thought; a trifle wistfully, be a wonderful thing to have a real chum. Well, that sort of thing just happened, he supposed. You didn’t go out and find a fellow whose looks you approved of and link arms with him and say, “Hello, hombre, let’s you and I be friends!” Monty grinned at the mental picture of what would happen if he followed such a course.

“Guess,” he muttered, as he dropped his heels from the sill, and heaved himself from the chair, “the poor fellow would drop dead of heart disease!”

He clapped his straw hat to his head—Monty’s hat had no regular position, but stayed wherever it happened to land, even if it happened to be over one ear—“cinched” up his belt another hole, and went downstairs. The group on the steps was reduced to a quartette now, and although no one said anything to the new boy each looked at him as invitingly as dignity permitted. But Monty failed to read invitation in their glances, and so passed on down the steps and turned into the well-worn path that led back between Morris and Fuller across the Green to Front Street and the athletic field. Set in the right-hand pillar of the ornamental gateway was a bronze tablet on which, enclosed by a border of laurel leaves, was the inscription: “Lothrop Field. In Memory of Charles Parkinson Lothrop, Class of 1911.” Monty wondered what deed Charles Parkinson Lothrop had performed to be so honored. And then the real portent of the phrase, “In Memory of” came to him, and his face sobered and the brick and stone pillars and the wrought-iron gates took on a new dignity in his eyes. And standing on the steps that led down to the broad path of the field, looking over the acres of level turf dotted with white figures where the tennis players were wresting a last hour of pleasure from the growing twilight, he thought that the boy could scarcely have had a finer memorial than this.

He paused outside one of the back nets and watched two youths send the balls back and forth with what seemed to him miraculous ease and certainty. The players were in white flannel trousers and white, short-sleeved shirts open at the necks. They wore no caps, and their hair was damp with perspiration. Monty had never played tennis, had scarcely ever watched it played, and the way in which the contenders darted on silent, rubber-shod feet here and there about the court, always anticipating the ball correctly, struck him as surprising. He stood there for quite a while, nibbling a blade of grass, and watched. Other courts held two, three or four players, and through the deepening dusk came the soft pat of ball against racket, the swish of hurrying feet, the occasional voices of the players, mellowed, as it seemed, by the warm twilight. The boys before him played swiftly and silently. They seldom spoke. When they did it was only a few brisk words, as “Hard luck, Hal!” when the effort of one went for naught, or “I’m sorry!” when a ball rolled into an adjacent court and had to be chased. There was no announcing of the score between aces. A wave of a racket seemed to answer for speech in most cases. Probably, thought Monty, they were chums and knew each other so well they didn’t have to speak! He envied them as he turned away at last, and went on along the path between the courts and the curve of the running track. Against the purpling sky the football goals stood out like giant H’s.

The gravel path ended where a backwater of the river, known as the Cove, stretched into the field. It gave forth the stagnant, but not unpleasant, odor of rotting vegetation, and over its quiet surface the mosquitos hovered in swarms, and a dissipated dragon-fly who should have been at home long since darted and swooped above the still reflections. Two skiffs lay half pulled out on the muddy bank, and one held a pair of weather-stained, broken-bladed oars. Monty would have preferred a canoe, and there were plenty of them further down the Cove, as he knew, but canoes were liable to have jealous owners, whereas he couldn’t imagine anyone caring a whit whether he helped himself to one of the leaky skiffs. So he shoved one off, put his feet out of the way of the water that swished about in the bottom, and dropped the oars into the locks. Monty was not a skilled rower, and he ran into the mud twice before he succeeded in getting the craft into the wider part of the Cove. On his left a grove of trees came to the water’s edge, and a few yards of mingled sand and pebbles there had been ironically named The Beach. This was the bathing spot approved of by the faculty, but few except timid juniors used it. The others preferred the boathouse float further up the river. Under the trees, back of the beach, a dozen or more upturned canoes rested, and as Monty went past another was being put in place by returned mariners. Monty could see the boys’ forms only dimly in the gloom of the grove, but their voices and laughter came to him distinctly.

“Lift your end, Hobo! Ata boy! Where’s the other paddle? Oh, all right. I see it.”