Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Football -- Juvenile fiction; Football stories
But Munson evened things up in the eighth, just when the home team had
visions of a one-to-nothing victory, by getting two clean hits off
Cochran and combining them with a clever steal. And at 1――1 the game
dragged――no, it never dragged for an instant. But at 1――1 it stayed
until the last of the eleventh. Holman’s had no hope of doing anything
in that particular inning, for the tail end of her batting list was up:
Wilder, Linder, Cochran. But you never can tell when the break will
come. Wilder was passed, Babe Linder laid down a sacrifice bunt and
Cochran, in spite of almost Herculean efforts, took the fourth ball
pitched squarely on his shoulder! Cross complained bitterly when the
rival pitcher was waved to first, and I think the incident affected his
delivery. At all events, Torrey, left fielder and head of the batting
list, rolled one toward third and after baseman and pitcher had each
politely left it to the other during a tragic moment the latter threw
late to first. With bases filled, but one out and Hal Norwin swinging
his two bats as he stepped to the plate, there could have been but one
outcome. Cross had to pitch ’em and he knew it. Perhaps Cross already
read the writing on the wall, for Hal said afterwards that that third
delivery came to him with nothing on it but a sunbeam. He said that
it looked so good he was almost afraid of it. Possibly Cross intended
he should be. But Hal didn’t scare quite so easily as that, and so he
took a fine healthy swing at it and it traveled. It went straight and
far and came safe to earth yards out of reach of right fielder and to
Cummins went the honor of scoring the winning tally!
Joe didn’t march back to the campus with the triumphant horde but
cut across back of the gymnasium and made his way to Number 14 in a
somewhat depressed frame of mind. He had watched the game from start
to finish and was well satisfied at the outcome, but he hadn’t been
happy. When you have worked hard from February on to win your position
and have set your heart on playing in the Big Game, why, you just can’t
help feeling a bit glum when the Big Game finds you perched among the
noncombatants of the grandstand. I don’t think Joe really regretted
what he had done. One can be sad without being sorry. But there were
moments when he was rather self-contemptuous, when he told himself that
he had done a silly, quixotic thing for which no one thanked him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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