“Aluminum, mostly. Light, aren’t they? Like them?”
“Gosh, yes, but I don’t know if I can do much with them. They don’t weigh more’n a third what mine do. I’m going to try them, just the same. I’m much obliged to you.”
“You’re welcome. Just see that you win a race with them. We’ll go down and root for you, Todd.”
“I might win the two-mile race,” replied Jim, “if I get so I can use these right. I’ll try ’em to-morrow.”
They didn’t see Jim again until the morning of the races. It was a corking day, that Saturday, with a wealth of winter sunshine flooding the world and only the mildest of northerly breezes blowing down the river. The weather and the list of events ought to have brought out a larger representation of the student body, but as a matter of fact by far the larger portion of those who had assembled at ten o’clock were contestants. Clem, yielding to the solicitations of the Committee, had entered for three races at the last moment, and it wasn’t until he had won the 220-yard senior event in hollow fashion from a field of more than a score of adversaries and been narrowly beaten in the quarter-mile race that he encountered Jim.
Jim had discarded his beloved gray sweater and was the cynosure of all eyes in a mackinaw coat of green and black plaid. The green was extremely green and the plaid was a very large one, and Jim presented an almost thrilling appearance. Under the mackinaw, his lean body was attired very simply in a white running shirt, and Clem addressed him sternly.
“Want to catch pneumonia and croak?” he demanded. “Don’t you know you can’t skate with that state’s prison offense on and that if you take it off you’ll freeze stiff? Where were you when they handed brains out, Todd?”
Jim grinned. “Hello,” he replied. “That was a nice licking you gave all those other fellows. And, say, if you’d got going quicker in that other race you’d have made it, easy.”
Clem was looking attentively at the mackinaw. Now he felt of it. “Say, that’s some coat, son. Where’d you get it?”