The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of LifeLewis, Sinclair
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The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Lewis, Sinclair
City and town life -- Fiction; Minnesota -- Fiction
"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful
boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a
fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him,
as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the
junior class, cajoling:
"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."
"But it makes me so sore----"
"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like
Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more
sense than decent folks."
"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant----O Lord, what's the use!"
He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for
indoor practice.
He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make
him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one
bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my
head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before
his locker.
Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them
gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge
that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to
decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty
times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly
that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered
to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who
had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated
bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling,
"Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.
Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs
with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him--slim,
wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin
glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a
clean-carved boy.
The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it,
playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.
An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French
Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather
likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly:
"'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants
pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to
be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"
Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of
substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a
fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and
the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea,"
and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the
substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us,
but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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