While the stands cavorted and cheered, Poor kicked the goal. Erskine was already victorious, and Robinson’s youngsters seemed to realize the fact. For, though they fought valiantly and doggedly for twenty minutes longer, it was evident that they no longer looked for victory. With every repulse their defense grew perceptibly weaker, while their rivals, as though they had husbanded their strength until now, made each attack fiercer than the one before, until in the last ten minutes of the contest they simply drove the Brown before them at will. Long before the game was at an end the stands began to empty; there was small pleasure in seeing a defeated enemy humbled. When the final whistle blew, the score stood 17 to 5, and Peter Burley, breathing hard through bleeding and swollen lips, said “he guessed he was ready to have his oats and be bedded down.”
[CHAPTER VII]
“THE RANCH”
It is human nature to dwell at length upon our successes and dismiss our failures with a word. The writer has given a chapter to the freshman game, but he is going to tell the story of the varsity contest, which occurred a week later, in a paragraph.
Robinson won in a clean, hard-fought game—11 to 0. Her rival never approached a score in either half, but by the grimmest sort of defensive work she managed to keep the final figures down to half of what they might have been had she gone to pieces for an instant. Hal played a brilliant game at full-back in that contest, and proved his right to the position. Thus the football season at Erskine ended in decisive defeat. It was an honorable defeat, to be sure; but, since at Erskine, as at other colleges in this country, they play more for the sake of winning than for love of the game, there were doleful faces a-plenty, and on Sunday the college had the appearance of a place smitten with the plague.
But Monday morning came and brought recitations and lectures, just as though there was no such thing as football, and the college settled back into the usual routine. At noon the sting of defeat was forgotten. At night, fellows were cheerfully discussing the chances for the next year. If we take defeat too hard, at least we recover quickly; there is hope for us in that.
Allan, for all that he was quite as patriotic as any, felt the defeat of the varsity team less than he did the cessation of track work. The latter left him at first feeling like a fish out of water. Tommy Sweet suggested that he might rig up a treadmill in his room and run to his heart’s content, like a squirrel in a wire cage. But Tommy wouldn’t promise to feed him all the peanuts he could eat, and so Allan refused to try the scheme. Instead, he spent much of his time out-of-doors and took long walks and runs out along the river or struck off westward to Millport.
On many of these excursions he was accompanied by Peter Burley. Peter—or more properly Pete, since that was the name he declared to be the proper one—Pete couldn’t be persuaded to do any running, but he was willing to walk any distance and in any direction, seeming to care very little whether he ever got back to Centerport or didn’t. And as his long legs took him over the ground about as fast as Allan could jog, the latter never suffered for want of exercise while in Pete’s company.