The Dozen from Lakerim

by Rupert Hughes

The athletic association from a neighboring school, known as the Brownsville School for Boys, had sent the Kingstonians an offer to bring along a team of cross-country runners to scour the regions around Kingston in competition with any team Kingston would put forth.

The challenge was cordially accepted at once, and the Brownsville people sent over John Orton, the best of their cross-country runners, to look over a course two days in advance, and decide upon the path along which he should lead his team. It was agreed that the course should be between six and eight miles long. The runners should start from the Kingston gymnasium, and report successively at the Macomb farm-house, which was some distance out of Kingston, and was cut off by numerous ditches and gullies; then at the railway junction two miles out of Kingston; then at a certain little red school-house, and then at the finish in front of the campus. It was agreed that the two teams should start in different directions and touch at these points in the reverse order. Each captain was allowed to choose his own course, and take such short cuts as he would, the three points being especially chosen with a view to keeping the men off the road and giving them plenty of fence-jumping, ditch-taking, and obstacle-leaping of all sorts.

The race was to have been run off in the afternoon; but the train was late, and the Brownsvillers did not arrive until just before supper. It was decided, after a solemn conference, that the race should be run in spite of the delay, and as soon as the supper had had a ghost of a chance to digest. The rising of a full and resplendent moon was a promise that the runners should not be entirely in the dark.

Tug and the Brownsville chief, Orton, had made careful surveys of the course they were to run over. It was as new to Tug as to the Brownsville man. Each of the two had planned his own short cuts, and even if they had been running over the course in the same direction they would have separated almost immediately. But when the signal-shot that sent them off in different directions rang out, they were standing back to back, and did not know anything of each other's whereabouts until they met again, face to face, at the end of the course.

The teams consisted of five men each. The only Lakerim men on the Kingston team were Tug, the chief, who had been a great runner of 440-yard races, and Sawed-Off, who had won the half-mile event on various field-days. The other three were Stage, Bloss, and MacManus. All of them were stocky runners and inured to hardship.

They had come out of the gymnasium in their bathrobes; and when the signal to start was given, the spectators in their warm overcoats felt chills scampering up and down their ribs as they noticed that all the men of both teams, when they had thrown off their bath-robes, stood clad only in running-shoes, short gymnasium-trunks, and jerseys.

But their heat was to come from within, and once they were started, cold was the least of their trials.

The two teams broke away from each other at the gymnasium, and bolted at a wide angle straight across the campus. They all took the first fence in perfect form, as if they were thoroughbred hunters racing after a fox.

Quiz and one or two other of the bicycle enthusiasts attempted to follow one or the other of the two packs; but they avoided the road so completely that the bicyclists soon lost them from sight, and returned to watch the finish.

The method of awarding the victory was this: the different runners were to be checked off as they passed the different stages of the course, and crossed off as they came across the finish-line. Each man was thus given the number of his place in the finish, and the total of the numbers earned by each team decided the match, the team having the smaller number winning. Thus the first man in added the number 1 to the total score of his side, while the last man in added 10 to his.