Short Stories for English Courses

V >> Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.) >> Short Stories for English Courses

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

"But he's gone"--continues Bill--"gone home. I showed him the road
to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick.
I'm sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll
to the madhouse."

Bill is puffing and blowing, but there is a look of ineffable
peace and growing content on his rose-pink features.

"Bill," says I, "there isn't any heart disease in your family, is
there?"

"No," says Bill, "nothing chronic except malaria and accidents.
Why?"

"Then you might turn around," says I, "and have a look behind
you."

Bill turns and sees the boy, and loses his complexion and sits
down plump on the ground and begins to pluck aimlessly at grass
and little sticks. For an hour I was afraid for his mind. And then
I told him that my scheme was to put the whole job through
immediately and that we would get the ransom and be off with it by
midnight if old Dorset fell in with our proposition. So Bill
braced up enough to give the kid a weak sort of a smile and a
promise to play the Russian in a Japanese war with him as soon as
he felt a little better.

I had a scheme for collecting that ransom without danger of being
caught by counterplots that ought to commend itself to
professional kidnappers. The tree under which the answer was to be
left--and the money later on--was close to the road fence with
big, bare fields on all sides. If a gang of constables should be
watching for any one to come for the note, they could see him a
long way off crossing the fields or in the road. But no, sirree!
At half-past eight I was up in that tree as well hidden as a tree
toad, waiting for the messenger to arrive.

Exactly on time, a half-grown boy rides up the road on a bicycle,
locates the pasteboard box at the foot of the fence-post, slips a
folded piece of paper into it, and pedals away again back toward
Summit.

I waited an hour and then concluded the thing was square. I slid
down the tree, got the note, slipped along the fence till I struck
the woods, and was back at the cave in another half an hour. I
opened the note, got near the lantern, and read it to Bill. It was
written with a pen in a crabbed hand, and the sum and substance of
it was this:

"Two Desperate Men.

"Gentlemen: I received your letter to-day by post, in regard to
the ransom you ask for the return of my son. I think you are a
little high in your demands, and I hereby make you a counter-
proposition, which I am inclined to believe you will accept. You
bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in
cash, and I agree to take him off your hands. You had better come
at night, for the neighbors believe he is lost, and I couldn't be
responsible for what they would do to anybody they saw bringing
him back.
Very respectfully,
"EBENEZER DORSET."

"Great pirates of Penzance!" says I; "of all the impudent----"

But I glanced at Bill, and hesitated. He had the most appealing
look in his eyes I ever saw on the face of a dumb or a talking
brute.

"Sam," says he, "what's two hundred and fifty dollars, after all?
We've got the money. One more night of this kid will send me to a
bed in Bedlam. Besides being a thorough gentleman, I think Mr.
Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer. You
ain't going to let the chance go, are you?"

"Tell you the truth, Bill," says I, "this little he ewe lamb has
somewhat got on my nerves too. We'll take him home, pay the
ransom, and make our get-away."

We took him home that night. We got him to go by telling him that
his father had bought a silver-mounted rifle and a pair of
moccasins for him, and we were going to hunt bears the next day.

It was just twelve o 'clock when we knocked at Ebenezer's front
door. Just at the moment when I should have been abstracting the
fifteen hundred dollars from the box under the tree, according to
the original proposition, Bill was counting out two hundred and
fifty dollars into Dorset's hand.

When the kid found out we were going to leave him at home he
started up a howl like a calliope and fastened himself as tight as
a leech to Bill's leg. His father peeled him away gradually, like
a porous plaster.

"How long can you hold him?" asks Bill.

"I'm not as strong as I used to be," says old Dorset, "but I think
I can promise you ten minutes."

"Enough," says Bill. "In ten minutes I shall cross the Central,
Southern, and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly
for the Canadian border."

And, as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a
runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of Summit before
I could catch up with him.

THE FRESHMAN FULL-BACK

BY

RALPH D. PAINE

The chief interest in "The Freshman Full-Back" is that of
character. The action has real dramatic quality and is staged with
the local color of a college contest. But the great value of the
action is ethical, for it shows that one may "wrest victory from
defeat" and that it is a shameful thing to be a "coward and a
quitter."

THE FRESHMAN FULL-BACK

[Footnote: From "College Years," by Ralph D. Paine. Copyright,
1909, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]

The boyish night city editor glanced along the copy-readers' table
and petulantly exclaimed:

"Isn't that spread head ready yet, Mr. Seeley? It goes on the
front page and we are holding open for it. Whew, but you are slow.
You ought to be holding down a job on a quarterly review."

A portly man of middle age dropped his pencil and turned heavily
in his chair to face the source of this public humiliation. An
angry flush overspread his face and he chewed at a grayish
mustache as if fighting down rebellion. His comrades at the long
table had looked up from their work and were eyeing the oldest
copy-reader with sympathetic uneasiness while they hoped that he
would be able to hold himself in hand. The night city editor felt
the tension of this brief tableau and awaited the threatened
outbreak with a nervous smile. But Seeley jerked his green
eyeshade so low that his face was partly in eclipse, and wheeled
round to resume his task with a catch of the breath and a tone of
surrender in his reply.

"The head will be ready in five minutes, sir. The last pages of
the story are just coming in."

A much younger man, at the farther end of the table, whispered to
his neighbor:

"That's cheap and nasty, to call down old man Seeley as if he were
a cub reporter. He may have lost his grip, but he deserves decent
treatment for what he has been. Managing editor of this very
sheet, London correspondent before that, and the crack man of the
staff when most of the rest of us were in short breeches. And now
Henry Harding Seeley isn't any too sure of keeping his job on the
copy-desk."

"That's what the New York newspaper game can do to you if you
stick at it too long," murmured the other. "Back to the farm for
mine."

It was long after midnight when these two put on their coats and
bade the city editor's desk a perfunctory "Good-night."

They left Henry Harding Seeley still slumped in his chair, writing
with dogged industry.

"He's dead tired, you can see that," commented one of the pair as
they headed for Broadway, "but, as usual, he is grinding out stuff
for the Sunday sheet after hours. He must need the extra coin
mighty bad. I came back for my overcoat at four the other morning,
after the poker game, and he was still pegging away just like
that."

Other belated editors and reporters of the Chronicle staff drifted
toward the elevator, until the gray-haired copy-reader was left
alone in the city room as if marooned. Writing as steadily as if
he were a machine warranted to turn out so many words an hour,
Seeley urged his pencil until the last page was finished. Then he
read and corrected the "story," slipped it through a slit in a
door marked "Sunday Editor," and trudged out, while the tower
clock was striking three.

Instead of seeking the chop-house, wherein the vivacious and
tireless youth of the staff were wont to linger over supper, he
turned into a side street and betook himself to a small cafe as
yet unfrequented by the night-owls of journalism. Seeley was a
beaten man, and he preferred to nurse his wounds in a morbid
isolation. His gait and aspect were those of one who was stolidly
struggling on the defensive, as if hostile circumstances had
driven him into a corner where he was making his last stand.

Through the years of his indomitable youth as a reporter of rare
ability and resourcefulness, he had never spared himself. Burning
the candle at both ends, with a vitality which had seemed
inexhaustible, he had won step after step of promotion until, at
forty, he was made managing editor of that huge and hard-driven
organization, the New York Chronicle. For five years of racking
responsibility, Henry Harding Seeley had been able to maintain the
pace demanded of his position.

Then came an error of judgment--a midnight decision demanded of a
fagged mind--and his 0.K. was scrawled upon the first sheet of a
story of embezzlement in Wall Street. By an incredible blunder the
name of the fugitive cashier was coupled with that of the wrong
bank. Publication of the Chronicle story started a terrific run on
this innocent institution, which won its libel suit against the
newspaper in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.

The managing editor, two reporters, and the copy-reader who had
handled the fatal manuscript, were swept out of the building by
one cyclonic order from the owner thereof. Henry Seeley accepted
his indirect responsibility for the disaster in grim, manly
fashion, and straightway sought another berth befitting his
journalistic station. But his one costly slip was more than a
nine-days' scandal along Park Row, and other canny proprietors
were afraid that he might hit them in the very vital regions of
their pockets. Worse than this, his confidence in himself had
suffered mortal damage. The wear and tear of his earlier years had
left him with little reserve power, and he went to pieces in the
face of adverse fortune.

"Worked out at forty-five," was the verdict of his friends, and
they began to pity him.

The will to succeed had been broken, but Seeley might have rallied
had not his wife died during the ebb-tide of his affairs. She had
walked hand in hand with him since his early twenties, her faith
in him had been his mainstay, and his happiness in her complete
and beautiful. Bereft of her when he stood most in need of her, he
seemed to have no more fight in him, and, drifting from one
newspaper office to another, he finally eddied into his old "shop"
as a drudging copy-reader and an object of sympathy to a younger
generation.

There was one son, strong, bright, eager, and by dint of driving
his eternally wearied brain overtime, the father had been able to
send him to Yale, his own alma mater. More or less pious deception
had led young Ernest Seeley to believe that his father had
regained much of his old-time prestige with the Chronicle and that
he had a hand in guiding its editorial destinies. The lad was a
Freshman, tremendously absorbed in the activities of the autumn
term, and his father was content that he should be so hedged about
by the interests of the campus world as to have small time or
thought for the grizzled, taciturn toiler in New York.

This was the kind of man that trudged heavily into the little
German cafe of an early morning after his long night's slavery at
the copy-desk. His mind, embittered and sensitive to slights like
a raw nerve, was brooding over the open taunt of the night city
editor, who had been an office boy under him in the years gone by.
From force of habit he seated himself at a table in the rear of
the room, shunning the chance of having to face an acquaintance.
Unfolding a copy of the city edition, which had been laid on his
desk damp from the press-room, Seeley scanned the front page with
scowling uneasiness, as if fearing to find some blunder of his own
handiwork. Then he turned to the sporting page and began to read
the football news.

His son Ernest had been playing as a substitute with the
university eleven, an achievement which stirred the father's pride
without moving his enthusiasm. And the boy, chilled by his
father's indifference, had said little about it during his
infrequent visits to New York. But now the elder Seeley sat erect,
and his stolid countenance was almost animated as he read, under a
New Haven date line:

"The Yale confidence of winning the game with Princeton to-morrow
has been shattered, and gloom enshrouds the camp of the Elis to-
night. Collins, the great full-back, who has been the key-stone of
Yale's offensive game, was taken to the infirmary late this
afternoon. He complained of feeling ill after the signal practice
yesterday; fever developed overnight, and the consulting
physicians decided that he must be operated on for appendicitis
without delay. His place in the Princeton game will be filled by
Ernest Seeley, the Freshman, who has been playing a phenomenal
game in the back-field, but who is so lacking in experience that
the coaches are all at sea to-night. The loss of Collins has swung
the betting around to even money instead of 5 to 3 on Yale."

The elder Seeley wiped his glasses as if not sure that he had read
aright.

Ernest had seemed to him no more than a sturdy infant and here he
was, on the eve of a championship football battle, picked to fight
for the "old blue." The father's career at Yale had been a most
honorable one. He, too, had played on the eleven and had helped to
win two desperate contests against Princeton. But all this
belonged to a part of his life which was dead and done for. He had
not achieved in after years what Yale expected of him, and his
record there was with his buried memories.

Supper was forgotten while Henry Seeley wondered whether he really
wanted to go to New Haven to see his boy play. Many of his old
friends and classmates would be there and he did not wish to meet
them.

And it stung him to the quick as he reflected:

"I should be very happy to see him win, but--but to see him
whipped! I couldn't brace and comfort him. And supposing it breaks
his heart to be whipped as it has broken mine? No, I won't let
myself think that. I'm a poor Yale man and a worse father, but I
couldn't stand going up there to-day."

Even more humiliating was the thought that he would shrink from
asking leave of the city editor. Saturday was not his "day off,"
and he so greatly hated to ask favors at the office, that the
possibility of being rebuffed was more than he was willing to
face.

Into his unhappy meditations broke a boisterous hail:

"Diogenes Seeley, as I live. Why, you old rascal, I thought you
were dead or something. Glad I didn't get foolish and go to bed.
Here, waiter, get busy."

Seeley was startled, and he looked much more distressed than
rejoiced as he lumbered from his table to grasp the outstretched
hand of a classmate. The opera-hat of this Mr. Richard Giddings
was cocked at a rakish angle, his blue eye twinkled good cheer and
youthful hilarity, and his aspect was utterly care-free.

"How are you, Dick?" said Seeley, with an unusual smile which
singularly brightened his face. "You don't look a day older than
when I last saw you. Still cutting coupons for a living?"

"Oh, money is the least of my worries," gayly rattled Mr.
Giddings. "Been doing the heavy society act to-night, and on my
way home found I needed some sauerkraut and beer to tone up my
jaded system. By Jove, Harry, you're as gray as a badger. This
newspaper game must be bad for the nerves. Lots of fellows have
asked me about you. Never see you at the University Club, nobody
sees you anywhere. Remarkable how a man can lose himself right
here in New York. Still running the Chronicle, I suppose."

"I'm still in the old shop, Dick," replied Seeley, glad to be rid
of this awkward question. "But I work nearly all night and sleep
most of the day, and am like a cog in a big machine that never
stops grinding."

"Shouldn't do it. Wears a man out," and Mr. Giddings sagely nodded
his head. "Course you are going up to the game to-day. Come along
with me. Special car with a big bunch of your old pals inside.
They'll be tickled to death to find I've dug you out of your hole.
Hello! Is that this morning's paper? Let me look at the sporting
page. Great team at New Haven, they tell me. What's the latest
odds? I put up a thousand at five to three last week and am
looking for some more easy money."

The alert eye of the volatile Richard Giddings swept down the New
Haven dispatch like lightning.

With a grievous outcry he smote the table and shouted:

"Collins out of the game? Great Scott, Harry, that's awful news.
And a green Freshman going to fill his shoes at the last minute. I
feel like weeping, honest I do. Who the deuce is this Seeley? Any
kin of yours? I suppose not or you would have bellowed it at me
before this."

"He is my only boy, Dick," and the father held up his head with a
shadow of his old manner. "I didn't know he had the ghost of a
show to make the team until I saw this dispatch."

"Then, of course, you are coming up with me," roared Mr. Giddings.
"I hope he's a chip of the old block. If he has your sand they
can't stop him. Jumping Jupiter, they couldn't have stopped you
with an axe when you were playing guard in our time, Harry. I feel
better already to know that it is your kid going in at full-back
to-day."

"No, I'm not going up, Dick," said Seeley slowly. "For one thing,
it is too short notice for me to break away from the office, and
I--I haven't the nerve to watch the boy go into the game. I'm not
feeling very fit."

"Stuff and nonsense, you need a brain cure," vociferated Richard
Giddings. "You, an old Yale guard, with a pup on the team, and he
a Freshman at that! Throw out your chest, man; tell the office to
go to the devil--where all newspapers belong--and meet me at the
station at ten o'clock sharp. You talk and look like the oldest
living grad with one foot in the grave."

Seeley flushed and bit his lip. His dulled realization of what
Yale had been to him was quickened by this tormenting comrade of
the brave days of old, but he could not be shaken from his
attitude of morbid self-effacement.

"No, Dick, it's no use," he returned with a tremulous smile. "You
can't budge me. But give my love to the crowd and tell them to
cheer for that youngster of mine until they're blue in the face."

Mr. Richard Giddings eyed him quizzically, and surmised that
something or other was gravely wrong with his grizzled classmate.
But Seeley offered no more explanations and the vivacious intruder
fell to his task of demolishing sauerkraut with great gusto, after
which he nimbly vanished into a cruising hansom with a sense of
having been rebuffed.

Seeley watched him depart at great speed and then plodded toward
his up-town lodgings. His sleep was distressed with unhappy
dreams, and during a wakeful interval he heard a knock at his
sitting-room door.

An office boy from the Chronicle editorial rooms gave him a note
and waited for an answer.

Seeley recognized the handwriting of the managing editor and was
worried, for he was always expecting the worst to happen. He
sighed with relieved surprise as he read:

"MY DEAR MR. SEELEY:

"Please go to New Haven as soon as possible and do a couple of
columns of descriptive introduction of the Yale-Princeton game.
The sporting department will cover the technical story, but a big
steamboat collision has just happened in North River, two or three
hundred drowned and so on, and I need every man in the shop. As an
old Yale player I am sure I can depend on you for a good story,
and I know you used to do this kind of stuff in fine style."

Seeley fished his watch from under a pillow. It was after ten
o'clock and the game would begin at two. While he hurried into his
clothes he was conscious of a distinct thrill of excited interest
akin to his old-time joy in the day's work. Could he "do this kind
of stuff in fine style"? Why, before his brain had begun to be
always tired, when he was the star reporter of the Chronicle, his
football introductions had been classics in Park Row. If there was
a spark of the old fire left in him he would try to strike it out,
and for the moment he forgot the burden of inertia which had so
long crushed him.

"But I don't want to run into Dick Giddings and his crowd," he
muttered as he sought his hat and overcoat. "And I'll be up in the
press-box away from the mob of old grads. Perhaps my luck has
turned."

When Henry Seeley reached the Yale field the eleven had gone to
the dressing-rooms in the training house, and he hovered on the
edge of the flooding crowds, fairly yearning for a glimpse of the
Freshman full-back and a farewell grasp of his hand. The habitual
dread lest the son find cause to be ashamed of his father had been
shoved into the background by a stronger, more natural emotion.
But he well knew that he ought not to invade the training quarters
in these last crucial moments. Ernest must not be distraught by a
feather's weight of any other interest than the task in hand. The
coaches would be delivering their final words of instruction and
the old Yale guard could picture to himself the tense absorption
of the scene. Like one coming out of a dream, the past was
returning to him in vivid, heart-stirring glimpses. Reluctantly he
sought his place in the press-box high above the vast
amphitheatre.

The preliminary spectacle was movingly familiar: the rippling
banks of color which rose on all sides to frame the long carpet of
chalked turf; the clamorous outbursts of cheering when an eddy of
Yale or Princeton undergraduates swirled and tossed at command of
the dancing dervish of a leader at the edge of the field below;
the bright, buoyant aspect of the multitude as viewed en masse.
Seeley leaned against the railing of his lofty perch and gazed at
this pageant until a sporting editor, long in harness, nudged his
elbow and said:

"Hello! I haven't seen you at a game in a dozen years. Doing the
story or just working the press-badge graft? That namesake of
yours will be meat for the Tigers, I'm afraid. Glad he doesn't
belong to you, aren't you?"

Seeley stared at him like a man in a trance and replied evasively:

"He may be good enough. It all depends on his sand and nerve. Yes,
I am doing the story for a change. Have you the final line-up?"

"Princeton is playing all her regular men," said the sporting
editor, giving Seeley his note-book. "The only Yale change is at
full-back--and that's a catastrophe."

Seeley copied the lists for reference and his pencil was not
steady when he came to "Full-back, Ernest T. Seeley." But he
pulled his thoughts away from the eleven and began to jot down
notes of the passing incidents which might serve to weave into the
fabric of his description. The unwonted stimulus aroused his
talent as if it were not dead but dormant. The scene appealed to
him with almost as much freshness and color as if he were
observing it for the first time.

A roar of cheering rose from a far corner of the field and ran
swiftly along the Yale side of the amphitheatre, which blossomed
in tossing blue. The Yale eleven scampered into view like colts at
pasture, the substitutes veering toward the benches behind the
side-line. Without more ado the team scattered in formation for
signal practice, paying no heed to the tumult which raged around
and above them. Agile, clean-limbed, splendid in their disciplined
young manhood, the dark blue of their stockings and the white "Y"
gleaming on their sweaters fairly trumpeted their significance to
Henry Seeley. And poised behind the rush-line, wearing his hard-
won university blue, was the lithe figure of the Freshman full-
back, Ernest Seeley.

The youngster, whose fate it was to be called a "forlorn hope,"
looked fragile beside his comrades of the eleven. Although tall
and wiry he was like a greyhound in a company of mastiffs. His
father, looking down at him from so great a height that he could
not read his face, muttered to himself while he dug his nails into
his palms:

"He is too light for this day's work. But he carries himself like
a thoroughbred."

The boy and his fellows seemed singularly remote from the shouting
thousands massed so near them. They had become the sole arbiters
of their fate, and their impressive isolation struck Henry Seeley
anew as the most dramatic feature of this magnificent picture. He
must sit idly by and watch his only son battle through the most
momentous hour of his young life, as if he were gazing down from
another planet.

The staccato cheers of Princeton rocketed along the other side of
the field, and the eleven from Old Nassau ran briskly over the
turf and wheeled into line for a last rehearsal of their machine-
like tactics. Henry Seeley was finding it hard to breathe, just as
it had happened in other days when he was waiting for the "kick-
off" and facing a straining Princeton line. The minutes were like
hours while the officials consulted with the captains in the
centre of the field. Then the two elevens ranged themselves across
the brown turf, there was breathless silence, and a Princeton toe
lifted the ball far down toward the Yale goal. It was the young
full-back who waited to receive the opening kick, while his
comrades thundered toward him to form a flying screen of
interference. But the twisting ball bounded from his too eager
arms, and another Yale back fell on it in time to save it from the
clutches of a meteoric Princeton end.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28