IV
OLE SKJARSEN’S FIRST TOUCHDOWN
BY GEORGE FITCH
From “At Good Old Siwash,” copyright, 1911, by Little, Brown and Company. By special permission of the author.
Am I going to the game Saturday? Am I? Me? Am I going to eat some more food this year? Am I going to draw my pay this month? Am I going to do any more breathing after I get this lungful used up? All foolish questions, pal. Very silly conversation. Pshaw!
Am I going to the game, you ask me? Is the sun going to get up to-morrow? You couldn’t keep me away from that game if you put a protective tariff of seventy-eight per cent ad valorem, whatever that means, on the front gate. I came out to this town on business, and I’ll have to take an extra fare train home to make up the time; but what of that? I’m going to the game, and when the Siwash team comes out I’m going to get up and give as near a correct imitation of a Roman mob and a Polish riot as my throat will stand; and if we put a crimp in the large-footed, humpy-shouldered behemoths we’re going up against this afternoon, I’m going out to-night and burn the City Hall. Any Siwash man who is a gentleman would do it. I’ll probably have to run like thunder to beat some of them to it.
You know how it is, old man. Or maybe you don’t, because you made all your end runs on the Glee Club. But I played football all through my college course and the microbe is still there. In the fall I think football, talk football, dream football. Even though I go out to the field and see little old Siwash lining up against a bunch of overgrown hippos from a university with a catalogue as thick as a city directory, the old mud-and-perspiration smell gets in my nostrils, and the desire to get under the bunch and feel the feet jabbing into my ribs boils up so strong that I have to hold on to myself with both hands. If you’ve never sat on a hard board and wanted to be between two halfbacks with your hands on their shoulders, and the quarter ready to sock a ball into your solar plexus, and eleven men daring you to dodge ’em, and nine thousand friends and enemies raising Cain and keeping him well propped up in the grandstands—if you haven’t had that want you wouldn’t know a healthy, able-bodied want if you ran into it on the street.
Of course, I never got any further along than a scrub. But what’s the odds? A broken bone feels just as grand to a scrub as to a star. I sometimes think a scrub gets more real football knowledge than a varsity man, because he doesn’t have to addle his brain by worrying about holding his job and keeping his wind, and by dreaming that he has fumbled a punt and presented ninety-five yards to the hereditary enemies of his college. I played scrub football five years, four of ’em under Bost, the greatest coach who ever put wings on the heels of a two-hundred-pound hunk of meat; and while my ribs never lasted long enough to put me on the team, what I didn’t learn about the game you could put in the other fellow’s eye.
Say, but it’s great, learning football under a good coach. It’s the finest training a man can get anywhere on this old globule. Football is only the smallest thing you learn. You learn how to be patient when what you want to do is to chew somebody up and spit him into the gutter. You learn to control your temper when it is on the high speed, with the throttle jerked wide open and buzzing like a hornet convention. You learn, by having it told you, just how small and foolish and insignificant you are, and how well this earth could stagger along without you if some one were to take a fly-killer and mash you with it. And you learn all this at the time of life when your head is swelling up until you mistake it for a planet, and regard whatever you say as a volcanic disturbance.
I suppose you think, like the rest of the chaps who never came out to practice but observed the game from the dollar-and-a-half seats, that being coached in football is like being instructed in German or calculus. You are told what to do and how to do it, and then you recite. Far from it, my boy! They don’t bother telling you what to do and how to do it on a big football field. Mostly they tell you what to do and how you do it. And they do it artistically, too. They use plenty of language. A football coach is picked out for his ready tongue. He must be a conversationalist. He must be able to talk to a greenhorn, with fine shoulders and a needle-shaped head, until that greenhorn would pick up the ball and take it through a Sioux war dance to get away from the conversation. You can’t reason with football men. They’re not logical, most of them. They are selected for their heels and shoulders and their leg muscles, and not for their ability to look at you with luminous eyes and say: “Yes, Professor, I think I understand.” The way to make ’em understand is to talk about them. Any man can understand you while you are telling him that if he were just a little bit slower he would have to be tied to the earth to keep up with it. That hurts his pride. And when you hurt his pride he takes it out on whatever is in front of him—which is the other team. Never get in front of a football player when you are coaching him.
But this brings me to the subject of Bost again. Bost is still coaching Siwash. This makes his ’steenth year. I guess he can stay there forever. He’s coached all these years and has never used the same adjective to the same man twice. There’s a record for you! He’s a little man, Bost is. He played end on some Western team when he only weighed one hundred and forty. Got his football knowledge there. But where he got his vocabulary is still a mystery. He has a way of convincing a man that a dill pickle would make a better guard than he is, and of making that man so jealous of the pickle that he will perform perfectly unreasonable feats for a week to beat it out for the place. He has a way of saying “Hurry up,” with a few descriptive adjectives tacked on, that makes a man rub himself in the stung place for an hour; and oh, how mad he can make you while he is telling you pleasantly that while the little fellow playing against you is only a prep and has sloping shoulders and weighs one hundred and eleven stripped, he is making you look like a bale of hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when he gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going wrong, and stands up before them and sizes up their nerve and rubber backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in that queer nasal clack of his—well, I’d rather be tied up in a great big frying-pan over a good hot stove for the same length of time, any day in the week. The reason Bost is a great coach is because his men don’t dare play poorly. When they do he talks to them. If he would only hit them, or skin them by inches, or shoot at them, they wouldn’t mind it so much; but when you get on the field with him and realize that if you miss a tackle he is going to get you out before the whole gang and tell you what a great mistake the Creator made when He put joints in your arms instead of letting them stick out stiff as they do any other signpost, you’re not going to miss that tackle, that’s all.
When Bost came to Siwash he succeeded a line of coaches who had been telling the fellows to get down low and hit the line hard, and had been showing them how to do it very patiently. Nice fellows, those coaches. Perfect gentlemen. Make you proud to associate with them. They could take a herd of green farmer boys, with wrists like mules’ ankles, and by Thanksgiving they would have them familiar with all the rudiments of the game. By that time the season would be over and all the schools in the vicinity would have beaten us by big scores. The next year the last year’s crop of big farmer boys would stay at home to husk corn, and the coach would begin all over on a new crop. The result was, we were a dub school at football. Any school that could scare up a good rangy halfback and a line that could hold sheep could get up an adding festival at our expense any time. We lived in a perpetual state of fear. Some day we felt that the normal school would come down and beat us. That would be the limit of disgrace. After that there would be nothing left to do but disband the college and take to drink to forget the past.
But Bost changed all that in one year. He didn’t care to show any one how to play football. He was just interested in making the player afraid not to play it. When you went down the field on a punt you knew that if you missed your man he would tell you when you came back that two stone hitching-posts out of three could get past you in a six-foot alley. If you missed a punt you could expect to be told that you might catch a haystack by running with your arms wide open, but that was no way to catch a football. Maybe things like that don’t sound jabby when two dozen men hear them! They kept us catching punts between classes, and tackling each other all the way to our rooms and back. We simply had to play football to keep from being bawled out. It’s an awful thing to have a coach with a tongue like a cheese knife swinging away at you, and to know that if you get mad and quit, no one but the dear old coll. will suffer—but it gets the results. They use the same system in the East, but there they only swear at a man, I believe. Siwash is a mighty proper college and you can’t swear on its campus, whatever else you do. Swearing is only a lazy man’s substitute for thinking, anyway; and Bost wasn’t lazy. He preferred the descriptive; he sat up nights thinking it out.
We began to see the results before Bost had been tracing our pedigrees for two weeks. First game of the season was with that little old dinky Normal School which had been scaring us so for the past five years. We had been satisfied to push some awkward halfback over the line once, and then hold on to the enemy so tight he couldn’t run; and we started out that year in the same old way. First half ended 0 to 0, with our boys pretty satisfied because they had kept the ball in Normal’s territory. Bost led the team and the substitutes into the overgrown barn we used for a gymnasium, and while we were still patting ourselves approvingly in our minds he cut loose:
“You pasty-faced, overfed, white-livered beanbag experts, what do you mean by running a beauty show instead of a football game?” he yelled. “Do you suppose I came out here to be art director of a statuary exhibit? Does any one of you imagine for a holy minute that he knows the difference between a football game and ushering in a church? Don’t fool yourselves. You don’t; you don’t know anything. All you ever knew about football I could carve on granite and put in my eye and never feel it. Nothing to nothing against a crowd of farmer boys who haven’t known a football from a duck’s egg for more than a week! Bah! If I ever turned the Old Folks’ Home loose on you doll babies they’d run up a century while you were hunting for your handkerchiefs. Jackson, what do you suppose a halfback is for? I don’t want cloak models. I want a man who can stick his head down and run. Don’t be afraid of that bean of yours; it hasn’t got anything worth saving in it. When you get the ball you’re supposed to run with it and not sit around trying to hatch it. You, Saunders! You held that other guard just like a sweet-pea vine. Where did you ever learn that sweet, lovely way of falling down on your nose when a real man sneezes at you? Did you ever hear of sand? Eat it! Eat it! Fill your self up with it. I want you to get in that line this half and stop something or I’ll make you play left end in a fancy-work club. Johnson, the only way to get you around the field is to put you on wheels and haul you. Next time you grow fast to the ground I’m going to violate some forestry regulations and take an axe to you. Same to you, Briggs. You’d make the All-American boundary posts, but that’s all. Vance, I picked you for a quarterback, but I made a mistake; you ought to be sorting eggs. That ball isn’t red hot. You don’t have to let go of it as soon as you get it. Don’t be afraid, nobody will step on you. This isn’t a rude game. It’s only a game of post-office. You needn’t act so nervous about it. Maybe some of the big girls will kiss you, but it won’t hurt.”
Bost stopped for breath and eyed us. We were a sick-looking crowd. You could almost see the remarks sticking into us and quivering. We had come in feeling pretty virtuous, and what we were getting was a hideous surprise.
“Now I want to tell this tea-party something,” continued Bost. “Either you’re going out on that field and score thirty points this last half or I’m going to let the girls of Siwash play your football for you. I’m tired of coaching men that aren’t good at anything but falling down scientifically when they’re tackled. There isn’t a broken nose among you. Every one of you will run back five yards to pick out a soft spot to fall on. It’s got to stop. You’re going to hold on to that ball this half and take it places. If some little fellow from Normal crosses his fingers and says ‘naughty, naughty,’ don’t fall on the ball and yell ‘down’ until they can hear it uptown. Thirty points is what I want out of you this half, and if you don’t get ’em—well, you just dare to come back here without them, that’s all. Now get out on that field and jostle somebody. Git!”
Did we git? Well, rather. We were so mad our clothes smoked. We would have quit the game right there and resigned from the team, but we didn’t dare to. Bost would have talked to us some more. And we didn’t dare not to make those thirty points, either. It was an awful tough job, but we did it with a couple over. We raged like wild beasts. We scared those gentle Normalites out of their boots. I can’t imagine how we ever got it into our heads that they could play football, anyway. When it was all over we went back to the gymnasium feeling righteously triumphant, and had another hour with Bost in which he took us all apart without anesthetics, and showed us how Nature would have done a better job if she had used a better grade of lumber in our composition.
That day made the Siwash team. The school went wild over the score. Bost rounded up two or three more good players, and every afternoon he lashed us around the field with that wire-edged tongue of his. On Saturdays we played, and oh, how we worked! In the first half we were afraid of what Bost would say to us when we came off the field. In the second half we were mad at what he had said. And how he did drive us down the field in practice! I can remember whole cross sections of his talk yet:
“Faster, faster, you scows. Line up. Quick! Johnson, are you waiting for a stone-mason to set you? Snap the ball. Tear into them. Low! Low! Hi-i! You end, do you think you’re the quarter pole in a horse race? Nine men went past you that time. If you can’t touch ’em drop ’em a souvenir card. Line up. Faster, faster! Oh, thunder, hurry up! If you ran a funeral, center, the corpse would spoil on your hands. Wow! Fumble! Drop on that ball. Drop on it! Hogboom, you’d fumble a loving-cup. Use your hand instead of your jaw to catch that ball. It isn’t good to eat. That’s four chances you’ve had. I could lose two games a day if I had you all the time. Now try that signal again—low, you linemen; there’s no girls watching you. Snap it; snap it. Great Scott! Say, Hogboom, come here. When you get that ball, don’t think we gave it to you to nurse. You’re supposed to start the same day with the line. We give you that ball to take forward. Have you got to get a legal permit to start those legs of yours? You’d make a good vault to store footballs in, but you’re too stationary for a fullback. Now I’ll give you one more chance—”
And maybe Hogboom wouldn’t go some with that chance!
In a month we had a team that wouldn’t have used past Siwash teams to hold its sweaters. It was mad all the time, and it played the game carnivorously. Siwash was delirious with joy. The whole school turned out for practice, and to see those eleven men snapping through signals up and down the field as fast as an ordinary man could run just congested us with happiness. You’ve no idea what a lovely time of the year autumn is when you can go out after classes and sit on a pine seat in the soft dusk and watch your college team pulling off end runs in as pretty formation as if they were chorus girls, while you discuss lazily with your friends just how many points it is going to run up on the neighboring schools. I never expect to be a Captain of Industry, but it couldn’t make me feel any more contented or powerful or complacent than to be a busted-up scrub in Siwash, with a team like that to watch. I’m pretty sure of that.
But, happy as we were, Bost wasn’t nearly content. He had ideals. I believe one of them must have been to run that team through a couple of brick flats without spoiling the formation. Nothing satisfied him. He was particularly distressed about the fullback. Hogboom was a good fellow and took signal practice perfectly, but he was no fiend. He lacked the vivacity of a real, first-class Bengal tiger. He wouldn’t eat any one alive. He’d run until he was pulled down, but you never expected him to explode in the midst of seven hostiles and ricochet down the field for forty yards. He never jumped over two men and on to another, and he never dodged two ways at once and laid out three men with stiff arms on his way to the goal. It wasn’t his style. He was good for two and a half yards every time, but that didn’t suit Bost. He was after statistics, and what does a three-yard buck amount to when you want 70 to 0 scores?
The result of this dissatisfaction was Ole Skjarsen. Late in September Bost disappeared for three days and came back leading Ole by a rope—at least, he was towing him by an old carpet-bag when we sighted him. Bost found him in a lumber camp, he afterward told us, and had to explain to him what college was before he would quit his job. He thought it was something good to eat at first, I believe. Ole was a timid young Norwegian giant, with a rick of white hair and a reënforced concrete physique. He escaped from his clothes in all directions, and was so green and bashful that you would have thought we were cannibals from the way he shied at us—though, as that was the year the bright hat-ribbons came in, I can’t blame him. He wasn’t like anything we had ever seen before in college. He was as big as a carthorse, as graceful as a dray and as meek as a missionary. He had a double width smile and a thin little old faded voice that made you think you could tip him over and shine your shoes on him with impunity. But I wouldn’t have tried it for a month’s allowance. His voice and his arms didn’t harmonize worth a cent. They were as big as ordinary legs—those arms, and they ended in hands that could have picked up a football and mislaid it among their fingers.
No wonder Ole was a sensation. He didn’t look exactly like football material to us, I’ll admit. He seemed more especially designed for light derrick work. But we trusted Bost implicitly by that time and we gave him a royal reception. We crowded around him as if he had been a T. R. capture straight from Africa. Everybody helped him register third prep, with business-college extras. Then we took him out, harnessed him in football armor, and set to work to teach him the game.
Bost went right to work on Ole in a businesslike manner. He tossed him the football and said, “Catch it.” Ole watched it sail past and then tore after it like a pup retrieving a stick. He got it in a few minutes and brought it back to where Bost was raving.
“See here, you overgrown fox terrier,” he shouted, “catch it on the fly. Here!” He hurled it at him.
“Aye ent seen no fly,” said Ole, allowing the ball to pass on as he conversed.
“You cotton-headed Scandinavian cattleship ballast, catch that ball in your arms when I throw it to you, and don’t let go of it!” shrieked Bost, shooting it at him again.
“Oll right,” said Ole patiently. He cornered the ball after a short struggle and stood hugging it faithfully.
“Toss it back, toss it back!” howled Bost, jumping up and down.
“Yu tal me to hold it,” said Ole reproachfully, hugging it tighter than ever.
“Drop it, you Mammoth Cave of ignorance!” yelled Bost. “If I had your head I’d sell it for cordwood. Drop it!”
Ole dropped the ball placidly. “Das ban fule game,” he smiled dazedly. “Aye ent care for it. Eny faller got a Yewsharp?”
That was the opening chapter of Ole’s instruction. The rest were just like it. You had to tell him to do a thing. You then had to show him how to do it. You then had to tell him how to stop doing it. After that you had to explain that he wasn’t to refrain forever—just until he had to do it again. Then you had to persuade him to do it again. He was as good-natured as a lost puppy, and just as hard to reason with. In three nights Bost was so hoarse that he couldn’t talk. He had called Ole everything in the dictionary that is fit to print; and the knowledge that Ole didn’t understand more than a hundredth part of it, and didn’t mind that, was wormwood to his soul.
For all that, we could see that if any one could teach Ole the game he would make a fine player. He was as hard as flint and so fast on his feet that we couldn’t tackle him any more than we could have tackled a jack-rabbit. He learned to catch the ball in a night, and as for defense—his one-handed catches of flying players would have made a National League fielder envious. But with all of it he was perfectly useless. You had to start him, stop him, back him, speed him up, throttle him down and run him off the field just as if he had been a close-coupled next year’s model scootcart. If we could have rigged up a driver’s seat and chauffeured Ole, it would have been all right. But every other method of trying to get him to understand what he was expected to do was a failure. He just grinned, took orders, executed them, and waited for more. When a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man takes a football, wades through eleven frantic scrubs, shakes them all off, and then stops dead with a clear field to the goal before him—because his instructions ran out when he shook the last scrub—you can be pardoned for feeling hopeless about him.
That was what happened the day before the Muggledorfer game. Bost had been working Ole at fullback all evening. He and the captain had steered him up and down the field as carefully as if he had been a sea-going yacht. It was a wonderful sight. Ole was under perfect control. He advanced the ball five yards, ten yards, or twenty at command. Nothing could stop him. The scrubs represented only so many doormats to him. Every time he made a play he stopped at the latter end of it for instructions.
When he stopped the last time, with nothing before him but the goal, and asked placidly, “Vere skoll I take das ball now, Master Bost?” I thought the coach would expire of the heat. He positively steamed with suppressed emotion. He swelled and got purple about the face. We were alarmed and were getting ready to hoop him like a barrel, when he found his tongue at last.
“You pale-eyed, prehistoric mudhead,” he spluttered, “I’ve spent a week trying to get through that skull lining of yours. It’s no use, you field boulder. Where do you keep your brains? Give me a chance at them. I just want to get into them one minute and stir them up with my finger. To think that I have to use you to play football when they are paying five dollars and a half for ox meat in Kansas City. Skjarsen, do you know anything at all?”
“Aye ban getting gude eddication,” said Ole serenely. “Aye tank I ban college faller purty sune, I don’t know. I like I skoll understand all das har big vorts yu make.”
“You’ll understand them, I don’t think,” moaned Bost. “You couldn’t understand a swift kick in the ribs. You are a fool. Understand that, muttonhead?”
Ole understood. “Vy for ye call me fule?” he said indignantly. “Aye du yust vat you say.”
“Ar-r-r-r!” bubbled Bost, walking around himself three or four times. “You do just what I say! Of course you do. Did I tell you to stop in the middle of the field? What would Muggledorfer do to you if you stopped there?”
“Ye ent tal me to go on,” said Ole sullenly. “Aye go on, Aye gass, pooty qveek den.”
“You bet you’ll go on,” said Bost. “Now, look here, you sausage material, to-morrow you play fullback. You stop everything that comes at you from the other side. Hear? You catch the ball when it comes to you. Hear? And when they give you the ball you take it, and don’t you dare to stop with it. Get that? Can I get that into your head without a drill and a blast? If you dare to stop with that ball I’ll ship you back to the lumber camp in a cattle car. Stop in the middle of the field—Ow!”
But at this point we took Bost away.
The next afternoon we dressed Ole up in his armor—he invariably got it on wrong side out if we didn’t help him—and took him out to the field. We confidently expected to promenade all over Muggledorfer—their coach was an innocent child beside Bost—and that was the reason why Ole was going to play. It didn’t matter much what he did.
Ole was just coming to a boil when we got him into his clothes. Bost’s remarks had gotten through his hide at last. He was pretty slow, Ole was, but he had begun getting mad the night before and had kept at the job all night and all morning. By afternoon he was seething, mostly in Norwegian. The injustice of being called a muttonhead all week for not obeying orders, and then being called a mudhead for stopping for orders, churned his soul, to say nothing of his language. He only averaged one English word in three, as he told us on the way out that to-day he was going to do exactly as he had been told or fill a martyr’s grave—only that wasn’t the way he put it.
The Muggledorfers were a pruny-looking lot. We had the game won when our team came out and glared at them. Bost had filled most of the positions with regular young mammoths, and when you dressed them up in football armor they were enough to make a Dreadnought a little nervous. The Muggleses kicked off to our team, and for a few plays we plowed along five or ten yards at a time. Then Ole was given the ball. He went twenty-five yards. Any other man would have been crushed to earth in five. He just waded through the middle of the line and went down the field, a moving mass of wrigging men. It was a wonderful play. They disinterred him at last and he started straight across the field for Bost.
“Aye ent mean to stop, Master Bost,” he shouted. “Dese fallers har, dey squash me down—”
We hauled him into line and went to work again. Ole had performed so well that the captain called his signal again. This time I hope I may be roasted in a subway in July if Ole didn’t run twenty-five yards with four Muggledorfer men hanging on his legs. We stood up and yelled until our teeth ached. It took about five minutes to get Ole dug out, and then he started for Bost again.
“Honest, Master Bost, Aye ent mean to stop,” he said imploringly. “Aye yust tal you, dese fallers ban devils. Aye fule dem naxt time—”
“Line up and shut up!” the captain shouted. The ball wasn’t over twenty yards from the line, and as a matter of course the quarter shot it back to Ole. He put his head down, gave one mad-bull plunge, laid a windrow of Muggledorfer players out on either side, and shot over the goal line like a locomotive.
We rose up to cheer a few lines, but stopped to stare. Ole didn’t stop at the goal line. He didn’t stop at the fence. He put up one hand, hurdled it, and disappeared across the campus like a young whirlwind.
“He doesn’t know enough to stop!” yelled Bost, rushing up to the fence. “Hustle up, you fellows, and bring him back!”
Three or four of us jumped the fence, but it was a hopeless game. Ole was disappearing up the campus and across the street. The Muggledorfer team was nonplussed and sort of indignant. To be bowled over by a cyclone, and then to have said cyclone break up the game by running away with the ball was to them a new idea in football. It wasn’t to those of us who knew Ole, however. One of us telephoned down to the “Leader” office where Hinckley, an old team man, worked, and asked him to head off Ole and send him back. Muggledorfer kindly consented to call time, and we started after the fugitive ourselves.
Ten minutes later we met Hinckley downtown. He looked as if he had had a slight argument with a thirteen-inch shell. He was also mad.
“What was that you asked me to stop?” he snorted, pinning himself together. “Was it a gorilla or a high explosive? When did you fellows begin importing steam rollers for the team? I asked him to stop. I ordered him to stop. Then I went around in front of him to stop him—and he ran right over me. I held on for thirty yards, but that’s no way to travel. I could have gone to the next town just as well, though. What sort of a game is this, and where is that tow-headed holy terror bound for?”
We gave the answer up, but we couldn’t give up Ole. He was too valuable to lose. How to catch him was the sticker. An awful uproar in the street gave us an idea. It was Ted Harris in the only auto in town—one of the earliest brands of sneeze vehicles. In a minute more four of us were in, and Ted was chiveying the thing up the street.
If you’ve never chased an escaping fullback in one of those pioneer automobiles you’ve got something coming. Take it all around, a good, swift man, running all the time, could almost keep ahead of one. We pumped up a tire, fixed a wire or two, and cranked up a few times; and the upshot of it was we were two miles out on the state road before we caught sight of Ole.
He was trotting briskly when we caught up with him, the ball under his arm, and that patient, resigned expression on his face that he always had when Bost cussed him. “Stop, Ole,” I yelled; “this is no Marathon. Come back. Climb in here with us.”
Ole shook his head and let out a notch of speed.
“Stop, you mullethead,” yelled Simpson above the roar of the auto—those old machines could roar some, too. “What do you mean by running off with our ball? You’re not supposed to do hare-and-hounds in football.”
Ole kept on running. We drove the car on ahead, stopped it across the road, and jumped out to stop him. When the attempt was over three of us picked up the fourth and put him aboard. Ole had tramped on us and had climbed over the auto.
Force wouldn’t do, that was plain. “Where are you going, Ole?” we pleaded as we tore along beside him.
“Aye ent know,” he panted, laboring up a hill; “das ban fule game, Aye tenk.”
“Come on back and play some more,” we urged. “Bost won’t like it, your running all over the country this way.”
“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.”
Ole looked around him sadly. He kept on running as he did. “Aye ent care to stop,” he said. “Aye kent suit you, Master Bost. You tal me Aye skoll du a teng, den you cuss me for duing et. You tal me not to du a teng and you cuss me some more den. Aye tenk I yust keep on a-running, lak yu tal me tu last night. Et ent so hard bein’ cussed ven yu ban running.”
“I tell you to stop, you potato-top,” gasped Bost. By this time he was fifteen yards behind and losing at every step. He had wasted too much breath on oratory. We picked him up in the car and set him alongside of Ole again.
“See here, Ole, I’m tired of this,” he said, sprinting up by him again. “The game’s waiting. Come on back. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
“Eny teng Aye du Aye ban beeg fule,” said Ole gloomily. “Aye yust keep on runnin’. Fallers ent got breath to call me fule ven Aye run. Aye tenk das best vay.”
We picked Bost up again thirty yards behind. Maybe he would have run better if he hadn’t choked so in his conversation. In another minute we landed him abreast of Ole again. He got out and sprinted for the third time. He wabbled as he did it.
“Ole,” he panted, “I’ve been mistaken in you. You are all right, Ole. I never saw a more intelligent fellow. I won’t cuss you any more, Ole. If you’ll stop now we’ll take you back in an automobile—hold on there a minute; can’t you see I’m all out of breath?”
“Aye ban gude faller, den?” asked Ole, letting out another link of speed.
“You are a”—puff-puff—“peach, Ole,” gasped Bost. “I’ll”—puff-puff—“never cuss you again. Please”—puff-puff—“stop! Oh, hang it, I’m all in.” And Bost sat down in the road.
A hundred yards on we noticed Ole slacken speed. “It’s sinking through his skull,” said Harris eagerly. In another minute he had stopped. We picked up Bost again and ran up to him. He surveyed us long and critically.
“Das ben qveer masheen,” he said finally. “Aye tenk Aye lak Aye skoll be riding back in it. Aye ent care for das futball game, Aye gass. It ban tu much running in it.”
We took Ole back to town in twenty-two minutes, three chickens, a dog and a back spring. It was close to five o’clock when he ran out on the field again. The Muggledorfer team was still waiting. Time was no object to them. They would only play ten minutes, but in that ten minutes Ole made three scores. Five substitutes stood back of either goal and asked him with great politeness to stop as he tore over the line. And he did it. If any one else had run six miles between halves he would have stopped a good deal short of the line. But as far as we could see, it hadn’t winded Ole.
Bost went home by himself that night after the game, not stopping even to assure us that as a team we were beneath his contempt. The next afternoon he was, if anything, a little more vitriolic than ever—but not with Ole. Toward the middle of the signal practice he pulled himself together and touched Ole gently.
“My dear Mr. Skjarsen,” he said apologetically, “if it will not annoy you too much, would you mind running the same way the rest of the team does? I don’t insist on it, mind you, but it looks so much better to the audience, you know.”
“Jas,” said Ole; “Aye ban fule, Aye gass, but yu ban tu polite to say it.”