“This is Isle Royale.” Her eyes were dreamy as she stared at the fire, that petite, vivacious little lady, Berley Todd. “This is the place where I have always played my summer away.
“And to think—” Her tone changed. “To think that those men might have killed me. Then I would have played no more.
“To think,” she mused, “never again to feel the lift of my boat as I danced along in Tobin’s Harbor or out on the open lake. Never again to skim along before a gentle gale. Never to climb the low mountains and look away, away, away to where the blue begins!
“You know,” her tone became confidential, “we were always children on this island. Sometimes we’d take blankets and a grub box, boys and girls together, four, six, ten, a dozen of us, and tramp away to the top of Mount Franklin. There, beside a fire on the rocks, we watched the twilight fade and counted the stars as they came out one by one.
“Then, rolling up in our blankets, we slept beneath those stars. Playing all summer long. Don’t you love to play?”
“I don’t know,” said Red slowly.
“But you have played! Football. You play football. That’s a game.”
“Is it?” He smiled a curious smile. “Well, perhaps. But it’s work, too, if you win. You have to keep everlastingly at it. And the thing you keep everlastingly at is pretty sure to seem like work.
“Play,” he mused, “play all summer. Play all winter would be good enough for me.” Football had taken its toll of his young life. He was weary, desperately weary; not the weariness that comes from a day of sudden, arduous toil, to be dispelled by a night’s repose, but the dull, dragged-out weariness experienced by an Arctic dog team after a five hundred mile trek over the frozen snow.
“Tell me,” the girl demanded suddenly, “what do you like?”