On Your Mark! A Story of College Life and AthleticsBarbour, Ralph Henry
General
On Your Mark! A Story of College Life and Athletics
Barbour, Ralph Henry
College sports -- Juvenile fiction; College students -- Juvenile fiction
The furniture, of which there was very little, represented Centerport’s
best: there was a “golden-oak” bureau, a “Flemish-oak” easy chair, a
“Chippendale” card-table--I am employing the dealer’s language--an
iron bedstead, a “mahogany” study table, a sprinkling of brightly
upholstered, straight-backed chairs, and a few other pieces, equally
highly polished and equally disturbing to the esthetic eye.
The walls were almost, but not quite, bare. Pete didn’t care for
pictures, but on nails driven at haphazard hung a silver-mounted
bridle, a rawhide lariat, a villainous-looking pair of Mexican
wheel-spurs, a leather-banded sombrero, a cartridge-belt and holster,
the latter holding a revolver, a leather quirt, and an Indian war-drum,
while over the bedstead in the back room the head of a grizzly bear
perpetually resented intrusion with snarling lips. The head of a
mountain-sheep held a place of honor in the other apartment, and
underneath it hung a Navajo Indian blanket, almost worth its weight in
gold.
There were only two objects that might have been set down in an
inventory as pictures: one was an advertising calendar and the other a
photograph of Pete’s mother, who had died soon after Pete’s advent in
the world. The photograph shared the top of the dazzling yellow bureau
with Pete’s brushes and shaving utensils.
In a corner of the front room was a trunk, covered with a yellow and
red saddle-blanket. Against it leaned two guns--a battered Winchester
carbine and a handsome two-barreled 12-gauge shot-gun. In another
corner, as though thrown there the moment before, lay a brown leather
stock saddle, with big hooded stirrups. The card-table held Pete’s
smoking things--two corn-cob pipes, a small sack of granulated tobacco,
and an ash-tray. The tobacco usually distributed itself over the table
and the ashes always blew onto the floor.
In bright weather, the sunlight streamed in through three of the five
windows and crossed the rooms in golden shafts, wherein the dust
atoms danced and swirled. With the sunlight came the sounds of the
neighborhood--the clang of the blacksmith’s sledge against the anvil,
the screech of the carpenter’s plane, the steady _tap_, _tap_, _tap_ of
the harness-maker’s hammer, the stamping of horses’ hoofs, the clamor
of passing trains, and the chatter of the loiterers below the windows.
Pete called the front room the “corral,” the rear room the “stable,”
the whole the “Ranch.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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