On Your Mark! A Story of College Life and Athletics

ith a word. The writer has given a chapter to the freshman game, but he is going to

one to pieces for an instant. Hal played a brilliant game at full-back in that contest, and proved his right to the position. Thus the football season at Erskine ended in decisive defeat. It was an honorable defeat, to be sure; but, s

llege settled back into the usual routine. At noon the sting of defeat was forgotten. At night, fellows were cheerfully disc

f water. Tommy Sweet suggested that he might rig up a treadmill in his room and run to his heart's content, like a squirrel in a wire cage. But Tommy wouldn't promise to feed him all the pea

t be persuaded to do any running, but he was willing to walk any distance and in any direction, seeming to care very little whether he ever got back to Centerport

latter's never-failing good-nature was undoubtedly one of them, but that alone was not accountable. Perhaps Pete would have experienced quite as much difficulty had he been called upon to say why he had been attracted by Allan the first time he had seen him, or why he had persever

left him unaffected. He had become a college hero in an hour, but none could see that it ever

and won the game. I didn't do a thing but shove 'em round some." And when it was hinted that the shoving around was what brou

pected by the others, he wasn't at all the popular conception of a college her

r had been much together. Tommy showed up at the gatherings less frequently than any one

d up two flights of stairs in McLean Hall, and Pete had a horror of climbing stairs. The only climbing h

et distant and the fire-house next door. Pete declared he liked the noise, and could never study so well as when the switch-engine was shunting cars

ne-and the lane wasn't wide enough to boast of-was a livery stable. On the opposite corner was a carriage repair-shop and warehouse. A few

the railroad, of the odor of pine-shavings from the carpenter shops, of the pungent smell of leather from below, and of the fragrance from the stable across the

ne the walls and ceiling painted a pea-green, mentally hang two big oil-lamps-one in the middle of each room-from the latter, and spread half a dozen skins-bear, coyote, antelope, and

hair, a "Chippendale" card-table-I am employing the dealer's language-an iron bedstead, a "mahogany" study table, a sprinkling of bri

s, 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 per

sing calendar and the other a photograph of Pete's mother, who had died soon after Pete's advent in the w

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

ounds 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

Grace Hall, and, to quote Tommy again, were "Pete through and through." Further, while Allan's, Hal's, and Tommy's rooms sometimes served as meeting-places for the four, the chambers over the harness-shop were their favorite re