Force wouldn’t do, that was plain. “Where are you going, Ole?” we pleaded as we tore along beside him.
“Aye ent know,” he panted, laboring up a hill; “das ban fule game, Aye tenk.”
“Come on back and play some more,” we urged. “Bost won’t like it, your running all over the country this way.”
“Das ban my orders,” panted Ole. “Aye ent no fule, yentlemen; Aye know ven Aye ban doing right teng. Master Bost he say ‘Keep on running!’ Aye gass I run till hal freeze on top. Aye ent know why. Master Bost he know, I tenk.”
“This is awful,” said Lambert, the manager of the team. “He’s taken Bost literally again—the chump. He’ll run till he lands up in those pine woods again. And that ball cost the association five dollars. Besides, we want him. What are we going to do?”
“I know,” I said. “We’re going back to get Bost. I guess the man who started him can stop him.”
We left Ole still plugging north and ran back to town. The game was still hanging fire. Bost was tearing his hair. Of course, the Muggledorfer fellows could have insisted on playing, but they weren’t anxious. Ole or no Ole, we could have walked all over them, and they knew it. Besides, they were having too much fun with Bost. They were sitting around, Indian-like, in their blankets, and every three minutes their captain would go and ask Bost with perfect politeness whether he thought they had better continue the game there or move it on to the next town in time to catch his fullback as he came through.
“Of course, we are in no hurry,” he would explain pleasantly; “we’re just here for amusement, anyway; and it’s as much fun watching you try to catch your players as it is to get scored on. Why don’t you hobble them, Mr. Bost? A fifty-yard rope wouldn’t interfere much with that gay young Percheron of yours, and it would save you lots of time rounding him up. Do you have to use a lariat when you put his harness on?”
Fancy Bost having to take all that conversation, with no adequate reply to make. When I got there he was blue in the face. It didn’t take him half a second to decide what to do. Telling the captain of the Siwash team to go ahead and play if Muggledorfer insisted, and on no account to use that 32 double-X play except on first downs, he jumped into the machine and we started for Ole.
There were no speed records in those days. Wouldn’t have made any difference if there were. Harris just turned on all the juice his old double-opposed motor could soak up, and when we hit the wooden crossings on the outskirts of town we fellows in the tonneau went up so high that we changed sides coming down. It wasn’t over twenty minutes till we sighted a little cloud of dust just beyond a little town to the north. Pretty soon we saw it was Ole. He was still doing his six miles per. We caught up and Bost hopped out, still mad.