On Your Mark! A Story of College Life and Athletics

by Ralph Henry Barbour

The friendship between the two had grown rapidly, until now Pete’s prophecy that they were to be “partners” had come true. The more Allan saw of the older boy the more he found to like, but just what the qualities were which drew him to Pete he would have found it hard to tell. The latter’s never-failing good-nature was undoubtedly one of them, but that alone was not accountable. Perhaps Pete would have experienced quite as much difficulty had he been called upon to say why he had been attracted by Allan the first time he had seen him, or why he had perseveringly sought his friendship ever since. The two were radically dissimilar, but even that isn’t sufficient to explain why each was attracted toward the other. Come to think of it, however, I don’t believe either Allan or Pete troubled himself about the problem, and so why should we?

Pete’s sudden leap into fame consequent upon his work against Robinson in the freshman game had left him unaffected. He had become a college hero in an hour, but none could see that it ever made any difference to him. He brushed congratulation aside good-naturedly and ridiculed praise.

“Stop your fool talk!” he would say. “I didn’t rope any steers. It was that little jack-rabbit, Poor, that whooped things up and won the game. I didn’t do a thing but shove ’em round some.” And when it was hinted that the shoving around was what brought victory, “Get out!” he would growl. “Science is what does the business, and I don’t know the first thing about the game.”

And so, while Peter was worshiped by the freshman class and very generally respected by the others, he wasn’t at all the popular conception of a college hero. And there were three fellows, at least, who liked him all the better for it.

Those three were Allan, Tommy, and Hal. Since that first meeting in Allan’s room, the four had been much together. Tommy showed up at the gatherings less frequently than any one of the others, for Tommy, in his own words, “had a lot of mighty difficult stunts to do.”

Sometimes the quartet met in Allan’s room, sometimes in Hal’s, less frequently in Tommy’s—for Tommy lived up two flights of stairs in McLean Hall, and Pete had a horror of climbing stairs. The only climbing he liked, he said, was climbing into a saddle. That was why he often found fault with his own apartments.

These were on the second floor of a plain clap-boarded building at the corner of Town Lane and Center Street, with the railroad but a few hundred feet distant and the fire-house next door. Pete declared he liked the noise, and could never study so well as when the switch-engine was shunting cars to and fro at the end of the lane or the fire-bell was clanging an infrequent alarm. As few ever saw him studying, the statement sounded plausible.

The ground floor of the building was occupied by a dealer in harness and leather; the third floor consisted of an empty loft. Across the lane—and the lane wasn’t wide enough to boast of—was a livery stable. On the opposite corner was a carriage repair-shop and warehouse. A few doors below was a wheelwright’s. The upper floors of the neighboring structures were occupied by carpenters, plumbers, roofers, and masons.

Through Pete’s windows, which were invariably open, be the weather what it might, floated in a strange and penetrating aroma—a mingled bouquet of coal-smoke from the railroad, of the odor of pine-shavings from the carpenter shops, of the pungent smell of leather from below, and of the fragrance from the stable across the street. Pete said it was healthful and satisfying. None disputed the latter quality. Pete’s rooms—there were two of them—were quite as unique as his surroundings.

Picture a bare, plank-ceiled loft, some forty feet long by twenty feet broad, divided in the exact center by a partition of half-inch matched boards and lighted by five windows. Imagine the walls and ceiling painted a pea-green, mentally hang two big oil-lamps—one in the middle of each room—from the latter, and spread half a dozen skins—bear, coyote, antelope, and cougar—over the discolored floor, and you have Pete’s apartments. There was a door in the partition, but as it wouldn’t close, owing to inequalities in the casing, it was always open.