"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.
"Where in Billy-be-blamed are you going, you human trolley car?" he
spluttered, sprinting along beside Skjarsen. "What do you mean by
breaking up a game in the middle and vamoosing with the ball? Do you
think we're going to win this game on mileage? Turn around, you chump,
and climb into this car."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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