Mahan thereupon kicked a couple more, low ones, but they went about as far.
"Who told you you could kick?" quoth Haughton. "You must kick high enough for your ends to cover the distance."
"Take it easy and don't get excited," Donovan was whispering to Mahan on the side. "Take your time, Ned."
But Mahan continued kicking from bad to worse. Haughton was getting disgusted, and finally remarked:
"Your ends never can cover those punts."
Mahan then kicked one straight up over his head, and the first word ever uttered by him on the Harvard field, was his reply to Haughton:
"I guess almost any end can cover that punt," he said.
Donovan tells me that he used to carry in his pocket a few blank cartridges for starting sprinters. Sitting on a bench with some friends, on Soldiers' Field, one day he reached into his hip pocket for some loose tobacco. Unconsciously he stuffed into the heel of his pipe a blank cartridge that had become mixed with the tobacco. The gun club was practicing within hearing distance of the field. As Donovan lighted his pipe the cartridge went off. He thought he was shot. Leaping to his feet he ran down the field, his friends after him.
"I was surprised at my own physical condition—at my being able to stand so well the shock of being shot," says Donovan in telling the story. "My friends thought also that I was shot. But when I slowed up, still bewildered, and they caught up with me, they were puzzled to see my face covered with powder marks and a broken pipe stem sticking out of my mouth.