“Well, there’s more to it than croquet,” said Toots dryly, “but don’t let that scare you. With Jim looking after you you ought to get along fine!”
“Really, do you think so?” asked Peck, gratefully. “Thank you ever so much!”
We had a whooping big freshman class that year and didn’t expect much trouble in finding all the material we needed. But we had reckoned without the war. A lot of fellows were so full of it that they couldn’t see football. There was talk of introducing military training at Erskine, too, and although that didn’t come until later, there was a lot of excitement over it. Of course, we were all strong for the military stuff, but some of us couldn’t see the necessity for making the world safe for Democracy before we had knocked the tar out of the Robinson freshmen. It was more than a week after college had started when we finally got four full squads together. The Athletic Committee assigned us a Graduate School chap named Goss as coach. He had played tackle for Erskine three years before. We didn’t cheer for him much at first, but he turned out fine. He wasn’t much on the up-to-the-minute stuff, but he was a corking tactician and hard as nails when it came to discipline. And he was so set on teaching the rudiments before the frills that we were soon calling him “Old Rudy.”
Faculty held us down to a six-game schedule, which was a shame, for we could have licked any team of our weight in New England. Besides, the Varsity was all shot to pieces, because so many last year men had enlisted, and was a sort of a joke, and we always took the crowds away from her. We were really the big noise that Fall and should have been allowed a decent schedule. Of course, every good team has its troubles, and ours began after the Connellsville game. We beat her, all right, but she laid up two of our best linesmen and proved that neither Kingsley nor Walker was the right man for quarter. We had two other candidates for the position in Ramsey and Peck. There wasn’t much to choose between them, it looked; only Peck had a good press agent and Ramsey hadn’t. Jim Phelan was still backing his roommate strong. Toots Hanscom told us that Jim was coaching Peck for an hour every evening. Said he dropped into their room in McLean one night and found Jim holding the book on Harold and putting him through a regular exam! Anyhow, Peck was certainly coming all the time, and when we met the Taylor freshies the next Saturday he had his chance in the third period. He got mixed a couple of times, but I couldn’t see any signs of nervousness, and he surely made us hump ourselves. And he played his position mighty well besides. Jim certainly had no kick coming against his pupil, for Peck played good football that day, barring those two mistakes in signals, and ended up in the last three or four minutes with as pretty a forward pass to Trask as you’d want to see. Trask didn’t quite make the goal line, though, and so we accepted our first defeat, Taylor nosing out 12 to 11. But we’d played good ball, and we knew it, and the school knew it. And you can bet that Taylor knew it, too, for she was just about all in when the whistle sounded.
Peck got quite a lot of kind words that day, and Jim Phelan went around saying “What did I tell you?” and making himself generally obnoxious. But that didn’t win Peck the quarterback position, for Kingsley was still the better man, especially when he was going well, and young Peck went back to the second squad Monday, and Jim spoke darkly of “bonehead coaches.” More trouble developed that week: Wednesday, I think it was. Pete Rankin—I forgot to say that we’d elected him captain without much opposition from the Enwright crowd—hurt his knee in a scrimmage and had to lay off. And one or two other chaps went wunky and so Townsend Tech didn’t have much trouble with us, three days later. Kingsley started at quarter and Peck didn’t get a show until the last of the third period. Then he played the same nice game he’d played the week before and speeded us up so that we managed to score our second touchdown. And, considering that we had six second- or third-string fellows in the line-up by that time, that wasn’t so poor. And 11 to 20 didn’t sound as bad as 7 to 20, either. So Peck got the glad hand in the locker room afterwards and old Rudy stopped him on his way to the showers and spoke kind words.
By that time the college was beginning to sit up and take notice of Peck. Fellows asked where he’d played before, what school he’d come from and so on. No one seemed to know, and when you asked Peck himself he was sort of vague, and so blamed polite that you didn’t have the crust to keep on asking. But I made out that he’d skipped around between two or three schools down Maryland way, and I believed it until two things came off simultaneously. The first was Peck’s sudden “arrival” in football. It occurred the Thursday after the Townsend fracas. Kingsley was suffering from shell shock by reason of having been slammed around by big Sanford, the Townsend fullback, in the third quarter, and old Rudy started Peck when the scrimmage began. Well, I don’t know what had got into little Harold that day; or I didn’t know then. Afterward I thought I had an inkling. Anyway, he was a revelation. Pete Rankin said awedly that Peck was a composite reincarnation of Eckersall and Daly. So far as I know, those two old-timers are still alive and kicking, but you get Pete’s idea. He meant that Peck was a peach of a quarter that day; and that goes double with me. We went up against the Varsity scrubs, and they were a heavy, scrappy bunch, even if they didn’t have much team play. Peck seemed to sense just the sort of medicine that would do ’em the most good, and he proceeded to dose it out to them right from the kick-off. He used Saunders and Hanscom for play after play until we were down to the scrub’s twenty-yard line, bringing Hanscom around from right end and busting him through left tackle. He and Saunders were light and quick, and they got the distance in three plays regularly. Then, down on the twenty, he switched to his other backs, Fellows and Curtis, and piled ’em through to the two yards. The scrubs pulled themselves together then, and two tries failed and Peck gave the pass to Curtis for an overhead heave to Saunders. But Bob was spilled in his tracks and, with three to go and one down left, Peck faked a try at goal and kited around his left end with the pigskin cuddled under his elbow and slipped across the line near the corner very nicely.
Four minutes later we scored again. The scrub’s kick-off was short and I wrapped myself around it and busted along for nearly twenty yards and landed the ball on the forty. Then Saunders slipped up for the first time and Peck tried a forward to Hanscom that grounded. Curtis smashed through for four and then Peck took the law into his own hands again and, faking a pass to Saunders, hid the ball until the scrubs were coming through. Then he found his hole, slipped right through the middle of the line, ducked and squirmed past the secondary defense and raced off straight for the goal. And believe me, that kid could run! The scrub quarter was the only man with any license to stop him, and Peck fooled him near the thirty yards, and went right on and placed old Mister Pigskin squarely between the posts.
I’d got sort of roughly handled by the big mutts when they stopped me after I’d caught the kick-off and Old Rudy yanked me out, and so I didn’t see any more of the scrimmage. But they said that Peck kept it up right to the end, making another corking run from near the scrub’s forty to her five, and handling the team like a veteran. Monty Fellows, who could spill language that would gag you or me, said that Peck was inspired and that he had “indubitably vindicated Phelan’s contention.” I thought so, too, though not in just those words, and so when I ran across Jim on the way to College Hall after dinner that evening I started to hand him a few bouquets. But he only grunted and looked peeved, and I eased up and asked: “What’s jangling your heart strings, Jim? I should think you’d be pleased to see little Harold vindicating your—er—whatyoucallems.” He sometimes called him Harold to annoy Jim.