“THE RANCH”
It is human nature to dwell at length upon our successes and dismiss
our failures with a word. The writer has given a chapter to the
freshman game, but he is going to tell the story of the varsity
contest, which occurred a week later, in a paragraph.
Robinson won in a clean, hard-fought game--11 to 0. Her rival never
approached a score in either half, but by the grimmest sort of
defensive work she managed to keep the final figures down to half of
what they might have been had she gone 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, since at
Erskine, as at other colleges in this country, they play more for the
sake of winning than for love of the game, there were doleful faces
a-plenty, and on Sunday the college had the appearance of a place
smitten with the plague.
But Monday morning came and brought recitations and lectures, just as
though there was no such thing as football, and the college settled
back into the usual routine. At noon the sting of defeat was forgotten.
At night, fellows were cheerfully discussing the chances for the next
year. If we take defeat too hard, at least we recover quickly; there is
hope for us in that.
Allan, for all that he was quite as patriotic as any, felt the defeat
of the varsity team less than he did the cessation of track work. The
latter left him at first feeling like a fish out of 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 peanuts he could eat, and so Allan refused
to try the scheme. Instead, he spent much of his time out-of-doors and
took long walks and runs out along the river or struck off westward to
Millport.
On many of these excursions he was accompanied by Peter Burley.
Peter--or more properly Pete, since that was the name he declared to
be the proper one--Pete couldn’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 or didn’t. And
as his long legs took him over the ground about as fast as Allan could
jog, the latter never suffered for want of exercise while in Pete’s
company.
The friendship between the two had grown rapidly, until now Pete’s
prophecy that they were to be “partners” had come true. The more
Allan saw of the older boy the more he found to like, but just what
the qualities were which drew him to Pete he would have found it hard
to tell. The 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 perseveringly sought his friendship ever since. The two were
radically dissimilar, but even that isn’t sufficient to explain why
each was attracted toward the other. Come to think of it, however, I
don’t believe either Allan or Pete troubled himself about the problem,
and so why should we?
Pete’s sudden leap into fame consequent upon his work against Robinson
in the freshman game had left him unaffected. He had become a college
hero in an hour, but none could see that it ever made any difference
to him. He brushed congratulation aside good-naturedly and ridiculed
praise.
“Stop your fool talk!” he would say. “I didn’t rope any steers. It was
that little jack-rabbit, Poor, that whooped things up 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 brought victory, “Get out!” he
would growl. “Science is what does the business, and I don’t know the
first thing about the game.”
And so, while Peter was worshiped by the freshman class and very
generally respected by the others, he wasn’t at all the popular
conception of a college hero. And there were three fellows, at least,
who liked him all the better for it.
Those three were Allan, Tommy, and Hal. Since that first meeting in
Allan’s room, the four had been much together. Tommy showed up at the
gatherings less frequently than any one of the others, for Tommy, in
his own words, “had a lot of mighty difficult stunts to do.”
Sometimes the quartet met in Allan’s room, sometimes in Hal’s, less
frequently in Tommy’s--for Tommy lived up two flights of stairs in
McLean Hall, and Pete had a horror of climbing stairs. The only
climbing he liked, he said, was climbing into a saddle. That was why he
often found fault with his own apartments.
These were on the second floor of a plain clap-boarded building at
the corner of Town Lane and Center Street, with the railroad but a
few hundred feet 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 to and fro at the end of the lane or
the fire-bell was clanging an infrequent alarm. As few ever saw him
studying, the statement sounded plausible.
The ground floor of the building was occupied by a dealer in harness
and leather; the third floor consisted of an empty loft. Across the
lane--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
doors below was a wheelwright’s. The upper floors of the neighboring
structures were occupied by carpenters, plumbers, roofers, and masons.
Through Pete’s windows, which were invariably open, be the weather what
it might, floated in a strange and penetrating aroma--a mingled bouquet
of coal-smoke from 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 street. Pete said it was healthful
and satisfying. None disputed the latter quality. Pete’s rooms--there
were two of them--were quite as unique as his surroundings.
Picture a bare, plank-ceiled loft, some forty feet long by twenty feet
broad, divided in the exact center by a partition of half-inch matched
boards and lighted by five windows. Imagine 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 cougar--over the discolored floor, and you
have Pete’s apartments. There was a door in the partition, but as it
wouldn’t close, owing to inequalities in the casing, it was always open.
The furniture, of which there was very little, represented Centerport’s
best: there was a “golden-oak” bureau, a “Flemish-oak” easy chair, a
“Chippendale” card-table--I am employing the dealer’s language--an
iron bedstead, a “mahogany” study table, a sprinkling of brightly
upholstered, straight-backed chairs, and a few other pieces, equally
highly polished and equally disturbing to the esthetic eye.
The walls were almost, but not quite, bare. Pete didn’t care for
pictures, but on nails driven at haphazard hung a silver-mounted
bridle, a rawhide lariat, a villainous-looking pair of Mexican
wheel-spurs, 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
perpetually resented intrusion with snarling lips. The head of a
mountain-sheep held a place of honor in the other apartment, and
underneath it hung a Navajo Indian blanket, almost worth its weight in
gold.
There were only two objects that might have been set down in an
inventory as pictures: one was an advertising calendar and the other a
photograph of Pete’s mother, who had died soon after Pete’s advent in
the world. The photograph shared the top of the dazzling yellow bureau
with Pete’s brushes and shaving utensils.
In a corner of the front room was a trunk, covered with a yellow and
red saddle-blanket. Against it leaned two guns--a battered Winchester
carbine and a handsome two-barreled 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 things--two corn-cob pipes, a small sack of granulated tobacco,
and an ash-tray. The tobacco usually distributed itself over the table
and the ashes always blew onto the floor.
In bright weather, the sunlight streamed in through three of the five
windows and crossed the rooms in golden shafts, wherein the dust
atoms danced and swirled. With the sunlight came the sounds 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 of horses’ hoofs, the clamor
of passing trains, and the chatter of the loiterers below the windows.
Pete called the front room the “corral,” the rear room the “stable,”
the whole the “Ranch.”
If I have risked tiring the reader with too long a description of
Pete’s dwelling-place, it is because, in spite of their strange
furnishings and hideous green walls, the rooms were far more homelike
than many a smart suite in 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 resort. There was
an undeniable charm about them; and if you could prevail upon Pete to
close a few of the windows in cold weather, and if you didn’t mind
sitting upon the tables and the trunk, you could be very comfy at the
Ranch.