Can Harvard score? Perhaps,—if the time and the men last long
enough.... Graham was a substitute. Eliot, supported between two of
his men and breathing threatenings and slaughter against those who would
carry him off, called Graham’s name; and with a nervous shiver the negro
was out of his sweater in a jiffy. Eliot whispered to the crimson
quarter, "Graham’s fresh; send him against that tackle till he faints."
_Bang—Smash_. _Bang—Smash_. Yes, he’s making it every time, but hurry!
_hurry_!
"Kill that nigger," growls Chreitsberg, the Kentucky Captain of the
Blue, between his set teeth: and now "that nigger" comes up with his
nose dripping blood, next with his ear ground half off. But he will
score this time! No, the Yale eleven are on him like a herd of
buffaloes. He stands up and draws his sleeve across his nose with a
determined swipe. Eliot screams from the side-lines, "You _must_ make
it this trip—time’s up,"—but he can’t hear his own voice in the
pandemonium.
A last crunching, grinding crash,—and the twenty-two maniacs heave, and
reel, and topple, and stagger, and slowly wring and twist themselves
into a writhing mass of bone and muscle which becomes motionless and
quiet at the bottom while still struggling and tearing without let-up on
the outside. They refuse to desist even when the referee’s whistle
sounds the end of the game, for no man knows just where under that mass
of players which is lying above the goal-line is the man with the ball.
The referee and the umpire begin to pull them off one by one in the
midst of an indescribable tumult: and at the bottom, with a broken leg,
but with the ball hugged tight against his breast and a saving foot and
a half beyond the line, they find Graham.
He is picked up by the roughly tender hands of his steaming, breathless
fellows, who are ready to cry with exultation, and hurried to a
carriage. It was while they were carrying him off the field he had
redeemed that he first saw Helen Phillips. She was standing on the rear
seat of a big red touring-car, waving a crimson pennant and excited
beyond measure. As she looked down on him as they carried him past,
there came into her face a look of childish admiration and pity
commingled; and she hesitated a moment, then impulsively pitched out the
pennant she held, and it fell across his chest like a decoration and was
carried with him thus to his room across the Charles.
When he had surprised her gaze at him as he turned from the parade of
the 71st, and saw her smile upon him, he thought she had recognized him
as the line-smashing half-back,—and he very properly drew in his middle
and shoved out his chest another notch. But not so! She did not
recognize him nor remember him. In her overflowing patriotism she saw
only a soldier of the Republic; and her smiling face had but
unconsciously paid tribute to an ideal.
*CHAPTER IV*
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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