THE SCHOOL FOUR
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BOOKS BY ALBERTUS T. DUDLEY
Phillips Exeter Series
Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth.
FOLLOWING THE BALL.
MAKING THE NINE.
IN THE LINE.
WITH MASK AND MITT.
THE GREAT YEAR.
THE YALE CUP.
A FULL-BACK AFLOAT.
THE PECKS IN CAMP.
THE HALF-MILER.
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Stories of the Triangular League
Illustrated by CHARLES COPELAND. 12mo. Cloth.
THE SCHOOL FOUR.
AT THE HOME-PLATE.
THE UNOFFICIAL PREFECT.
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THE KING’S POWDER.
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LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON.
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[Illustration: THE WESTCOTT MAN CLUTCHED THE BALL OVER HIS RIVAL’S
HEAD.]
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STORIES OF THE TRIANGULAR LEAGUE
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THE SCHOOL FOUR
BY
ALBERTUS T. DUDLEY
AUTHOR OF “PHILLIPS EXETER SERIES”
ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES COPELAND
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
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COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
Published, August, 1909.
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All Rights Reserved.
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THE SCHOOL FOUR.
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
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PREFACE
“The School Four” is a story of football and rowing, its scene laid in a
private school in an Eastern city. As in the Phillips Exeter books, the
aim has been to keep the athletics practical and technically correct,
and at the same time to present such conceptions of life and conduct as
may encourage the boy reader to face his own school problems with the
right spirit. Later volumes will treat successively of the city high
school and the country boarding-school.
To Mr. John Richardson, Jr., captain of the undefeated Harvard crew of
1908, the author owes a special debt for expert counsel, for the freedom
of the Harvard coaching launch, and, above all else, for personal
inspiration.
A. T. DUDLEY.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
JOHN SMITH, PRESIDENT
CHAPTER II
THE CUP
CHAPTER III
ARCHIBALD DUNN
CHAPTER IV
RECRUITS FOR THE FOOTBALL SQUAD
CHAPTER V
AT ADAMS’S
CHAPTER VI
THE STORY OF JASON
CHAPTER VII
SUMNER CHOOSES A SUCCESSOR
CHAPTER VIII
A SLIGHTED OFFER
CHAPTER IX
THE NEWBURY GAME
CHAPTER X
THE SCOUTS BRING NEWS
CHAPTER XI
A FRUITLESS INTERVIEW
CHAPTER XII
PRESIDENT JOHN’S IDEALS
CHAPTER XIII
THE COMMITTEE DECIDES
CHAPTER XIV
THE TROWBRIDGE GAME
CHAPTER XV
DUNN’S DISAPPOINTMENTS
CHAPTER XVI
MIKE ADVISES
CHAPTER XVII
A KINDLED AMBITION
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SHOOTING MATCH
CHAPTER XIX
A LOSS TO THE NINE
CHAPTER XX
IN THE PAIR-OAR
CHAPTER XXI
THE SECOND CREW
CHAPTER XXII
A SHIFT IN THE BOAT
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WEAKENED HEART
CHAPTER XXIV
THE TRIALS
CHAPTER XXV
THE FINAL STRUGGLE
CHAPTER XXVI
CONCLUSION
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ILLUSTRATIONS
The Westcott man clutched the ball over his rival’s head
“They ought to tie a string to it and give Fatty the end”
His feet going like the arms of a hay tedder
Swung him directly into Hardie’s arms
And watch the Varsity eight sweep magnificently by
“Go it, Bainbridge! Kill ’em, Bainbridge!”
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THE SCHOOL FOUR
CHAPTER I
JOHN SMITH, PRESIDENT
THE first suggestion of the Triangular League came from a certain
aspiring and nimble-witted graduate of the Newbury Latin named John
Smith, whose surname, occurring on every page of every daily paper,
should safely conceal his identity from any over-curious reader of this
story. Moreover, it may be asserted with truth that the particular John
Smith who called the first meeting of representatives of the three
schools is not to be found on any of the eighteen pages of Smiths in the
last Boston directory. It is enough for our purpose to know that he
looked over the material in the upper half of the Newbury Latin and
found it to his liking—good for the present and promising for the
future. He considered within himself, with what he imagined to be
uncommon shrewdness, that it is better for a school to be at the head of
a small league than to swell the troop at the conqueror’s heels in a
larger one. His reason for selecting Westcott’s and the Trowbridge
School as complements to the Newbury Latin in this laudably patriotic
scheme was that while they contained decent fellows and were nominally
fair rivals, they were probably beatable without killing exertion. This
last item was not included in the argument for the organization which he
presented to the first meeting. His speech here took loftier grounds,
such as the charms of an alliance between naturally friendly schools,
and the splendid athletic ideals for which the new league would stand.
Either John Smith’s idea or John Smith’s argument carried weight, for
the league was formed, and the three schools pledged themselves to
maintain it and abide by its rules. In recognition of his unselfish
services in behalf of the cause, and at the suggestion of Mr. Snyder, an
instructor at Trowbridge, who insisted that the direction of affairs
should be in the hands of some mature person, Mr. John Smith was elected
president. It was voted that a managing committee consisting of two
representatives from each school, together with the president, _ex
officio_, should be empowered to draw up rules, arrange schedules,
select officials, and act as general board of control.
The first meeting of this permanent committee was held at Westcott’s, in
Boston, just before the end of the school year. After the visitors had
departed, Sumner and Talbot remained behind to discuss events from the
Westcott point of view.
“It’s going to be great!” opined Sumner, with his usual outburst of
enthusiasm for what he approved. “Everything was pleasant and straight,
and nobody tried to get the advantage of anybody else.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” answered Joe Talbot, commonly called
“Pete.” The origin of this nickname is involved in obscurity. Some boys
derived it from a character in a play; some asserted that Joe’s family
had given him the name in jest when he was a toddler. Steve Wilmot, the
wag of the class, maintained that it was descriptive,—he was called
Pete because he looked Pete,—and this explanation was on the whole
popular, especially as Talbot stoutly protested against it.
“Why not?” demanded Sumner.
“I’ve no confidence in that Smith. He’s too oily and smug. He’s got some
scheme he means to work.”
“Shucks!” retorted Jack. “Your brother Bob has prejudiced you against
him with his talk about that old football squabble. If I were a junior
in college, like Bob, I’d try to forget about school rows.”
“Those are the things you remember longest,” Pete answered wisely. “You
can’t change the facts, can you? You can’t make a low trick any better
by forgetting it. If it happened, it’s history, as much as Bunker Hill.
It shows the kind of man Smith is.”
“Was!” corrected Jack. “That was a long time ago, and he’s probably
changed as much as we have since we came into the sixth together. Just
think what little fools we were then, how we thought the verb _amo_ was
too hard to learn, and cried when Mr. Lawton lectured us, and Mussy used
to send us out of French every day for whispering in class.”
“We weren’t anything but kids then. Neither of us was over twelve.”
Talbot spoke as if seventeen, which was their present age, represented
the climax of maturity.
“I was just trying to make you see that people change. Smith has changed
too.”
“Perhaps he has,” growled Talbot, “but I don’t believe it’s for the
better. He’s got us into the league just because he thinks Newbury can
beat us. You don’t suppose he’s doing it out of love for us, do you?”
“No doubt he thinks we are a good crowd for his school to tie up with,”
answered Sumner, with ready complacency. “I really believe those fellows
would rather beat us than any other school, but that’s because they are
jealous of us. We are only a private school, more than half of us little
kids in knickerbockers, but we have the inside track in Harvard, and
we’re on the top socially. They don’t like that.”
“It’s the little kids and getting into college so early that spoils our
athletics,” remarked Talbot. “Newbury is a public endowed school with
lots of big fellows who don’t go to college, and Trowbridge is a
boarding-school in the country where the fellows have nothing to do but
play games all day. We aren’t anything but a school building in town and
a playground in Brookline.”
“And Adams’s,” put in Sumner.
Adams’s was the house of the instructor who lived at the athletic field.
It contained a schoolroom for such boys as were condemned to prepare the
next day’s lessons before they left the field in the afternoon, and
quarters for a limited number of boarding pupils.
“Adams’s!” exclaimed Pete. “What good is that? A half-dozen little kids
who play on the fourth or third, and a few older fellows whose parents
are abroad or can’t stand them at home. There wasn’t a fellow there last
year who did anything for the school.”
“There was Pitkin,” Sumner remarked. “He’d have made the second crew if
he hadn’t caught the measles.”
“He might,” responded Talbot, in a tone which implied that he probably
wouldn’t. “But what’s Pitkin, anyway?”
“Ben Tracy is going there next year,” went on Sumner, “and that cousin
Louis of his who lives in Worcester, and some one from New Jersey. There
may be some other new fellows.”
“The usual orphan asylum!” commented Talbot, savagely. “It’s four to one
that none of ’em will be good for anything. You always see things about
one hundred per cent better than they really are.”
“That’s not half so bad as seeing them one hundred per cent worse than
they are, as you do, you old growler!” retorted his friend, with a
laugh.
“They can’t be a hundred per cent worse,” maintained Talbot. “That’s a
logical impossibility. It would bring ’em below the zero point.”
And then, being boys, in spite of their advanced age and the seriousness
of their interest and the fact that both, avowedly at least, were
putting every available minute into their preparation for the next
week’s battle with the Harvard preliminaries, they wrangled for a good
quarter of an hour over the possibility—logical, actual, or
theoretical—of things being a hundred per cent worse than they were
without reaching the vanishing point. The reader will be spared this
argument. If he is a boy, he can manufacture it for himself; if a
grown-up, he has only to listen quietly to a knot of boys waiting in
idleness for a bell to ring or a train to appear, and he will understand
how it is done.
When the discussion had run its length, they recurred naturally to the
first theme of conversation. It was Pete who reintroduced the topic of
the new league.
“Whether Smith is straight or crooked,” he said, “he certainly expects
his school to come out ahead. I’d give something to beat him at his
little game.”
“Wouldn’t it be great!” Sumner’s exclamation was like an anticipatory
smack of the lips; his eyes were fixed in a fervent but unseeing stare
on the blank wall, his face beamed with delight at the mental foretaste
of the joys of triumph. “We may do it, too!”
“And we may not!” answered Talbot, rising. “Let’s get after those French
sentences.”
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