The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

THE GREAT PECK

Eight of us were in Pete Rankin’s room that night, all freshies and all candidates for the ’21 football team, unless you except this fellow Harold Peck that I’m telling you about. Jim Phelan had brought him along, because, he said, he looked lonesome. Jim had planned to room with a chap he had chummed with at Hollins, but he had failed in exams and faculty had stung him with Peck. That’s one drawback to rooming in the yard at Erskine: you can’t always choose your roommate. Peck was sort of finely cut, with small, well-made features, dark hair and eyes and a good deal of color in his face. And he was a swell little dresser. Rather an attractive kid, on the whole, and maybe a year younger than most of us there. He didn’t make much of a splash that night, though, for he just sat quiet on Pete’s trunk and looked interested and polite. Being polite was Peck’s specialty. I never knew a chap with more different ways of thanking you or begging your pardon.

We were mostly Hollins or Enwright fellows, and we were there to get the freshman football team started. Dave Walker, the Varsity captain, dropped in for a few minutes and helped us out; and after he had gone again we got to talking about our chances of turning out a good enough eleven to beat the Robinson freshies, and who would play where, and one thing and another, and presently Bob Saunders, who had played half for Enwright last year, asked: “What have we got for quarterback material, fellows?”

Trask, another Enwright chap, said: “Kingsley,” but no one enthused. Tom Kingsley had been a second choice quarter on Trask’s team and had been fairly punk, we Hollins crowd thought. Pete Rankin yawned and said he guessed we’d find a couple of decent quarters all right, and Jim Phelan said, sure, you can always catch a quarter when he was young and train him.

“I think I’d like to try that job,” I said. “I guess it’s easier than playing tackle. You don’t have to exert yourself. You just shove the ball to someone else. It’s a cinch!”

“You’d make a swell little quarterback,” laughed Pete. “You’re just built for it, Joe.”

“Well, I’m down to a hundred and eighty-one and a half——”

“I don’t think I ever saw a crackerjack quarter,” Jim Phelan butted in, “who wasn’t sort of small. Did you, Pete? Remember Warner, of two years ago? He was my notion of a properly built lad for the quarter. Wasn’t he a wonder?” Pete said yes, and “Toots” Hanscom, who will take either end of any argument you can start, tried to prove Jim all wrong, and then everyone took a hand. But Jim is stubborn, and he hung out for the small kind. “Take a chap like—well, like Peck there. If he knows the game he will play all around your heavy man or your tall one.”