ARCHIBALD DUNN
ROGER HARDIE knew absolutely no one at Westcott’s when he moved into his
room at Adams’s that fall. His father was engaged in the Argentine
trade; and the day after Roger was safely established in school the
whole family sailed for Buenos Aires to spend the winter there. He took
his fate stoically, trying hard to persuade himself that he should soon
feel at home, but he could not avoid the sense of isolation and
exclusion which comes naturally to one of a very few new boys among a
great many very intimate old ones; and he lacked entirely the aptitude
for quick friendships. Boys are seldom temperate in their opinions of
their own merits. Eliminate the over-confident who run to freshness and
the under-confident who lack courage to assert themselves, and there
remain but a small percentage who wisely follow the middle course. The
over-modest in the end is likely to outstrip the over-bold, whose rash
spirit is easily broken by unexpected and humiliating defeats. The
average boy, however, takes very little thought for ultimate results. He
lives vividly in the present, is captivated by boldness and dash and
ready wit, ranks caution with timidity, and suspects steadiness to be
mere feebleness in disguise.
Roger was naturally reticent; he was likewise inclined to regard himself
as neither attractive nor clever. The first impression which he produced
on his mates at Adams’s was that of mediocrity. They took him at his own
valuation and disregarded him. The consciousness that he wasn’t
considered worth while increased his reticence, and at the same time
stirred his obstinacy. He certainly didn’t care for the boys if they
didn’t care for him. He would go one way, and let them go another.
Hardie’s pique was enhanced by the apparently different reception
accorded to another new Adamsite, Archibald Dunn. As a matter of fact,
the principle followed by the boys in the treatment of the two cases was
identical: each was accepted at the outset at his face value. While
Hardie made no claim to ability, importance, or friends among the great,
Dunn’s method was to assume everything, to throw himself frankly on the
credulity and friendliness of his new companions. Of course he played
football; he had been end on the Westport High School at the beginning
of last season, but a shoulder bruise got in the practice had thrown him
out of the regular games. He liked baseball better; he and a friend of
his, who made the Yale Freshmen, used to be the battery of a corking
little nine they got up at their summer place. His favorite sport was
automobiling; in his first half-hour in Tracy’s room he told five
astonishing stories of marvellous escapes from death or the police. He
sailed, too,—used to take charge of his uncle’s forty-footer in
cruises. Dunn’s manners were undeniably easy. In twenty-four hours he
knew all the small boys at Adams’s by their nicknames, and treated the
older ones as if they were intimates of years’ standing.
The Tracys, Ben and Louis, might smile a little incredulously at the
broadest of Dunn’s claims, but he amused them, and, provisionally at
least, they accepted him. “He’s good sport, anyway,” said Ben, on the
second day of school, while describing the Adams household to Sumner.
“He can talk more than any person I ever saw, and he likes himself to
beat the band, but he seems to be a good fellow to have round.”
“What about Hardie?”
“Oh, he’s a zero, a good little boy that never speaks unless he’s spoken
to. He sat up in his room all last evening, grinding at algebra and
Latin. Just think of being so fierce about the first day’s lessons!”
“All the new ones do that,” opined Sumner; “they’re scared.”
“Dunn didn’t. He loafed round Louis’s room, telling stories, the first
two hours, and spent the rest of the evening looking for a trot to
Xenophon. He says it’s a waste of time trying to get along without one.”
“Flunked to-day, didn’t he?”
“Don’t know. He’s not in any of my classes.”
By favor of chance, Dunn did not flunk. He was called up in Latin on
grammar questions which he happened to know. Hardie did not escape so
easily. His lot fell upon a difficult passage which in his preparation
he had not fully understood. Confused by the new surroundings and
agitated by a nervous eagerness to do well, he floundered along like a
pig in the mud, getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing but the
amusement of a cruelly grinning class.
To escape unscathed without having prepared a lesson was, of course, a
piece of good fortune which a boy could not expect to experience often.
Before the week was out, Dunn had been pretty well gauged by his
teachers, and one of the most conscientious had already begun in the
simple old-fashioned way—which Dunn reviled as antiquated—to detain
him after school to make up neglected work. But what he lost in prestige
by classroom deficiencies—boys never charge such failures up against a
good comrade—he made ample amends for by marked success on the football
field, where he was generally regarded as the most promising addition to
the available material which the new season had brought.
Here Dunn’s own lively tongue had prepared for him a favorable
reception. While he did not actually declare himself a great player, his
ready vocabulary of football terms, his anecdotes of games which he had
seen or taken part in, the air of familiarity with styles of play which
he showed—all marked him as a veteran. Besides this, he was an end, and
the eleven lacked an end. With Harrison, the captain, at one extremity
of the line and Dunn at the other, the two important wings of the
fighting force would be well equipped. The idea pleased the school fancy
and produced a strong prejudice in Dunn’s favor. The boys believed in
him because they needed him, and it was more agreeable to believe than
to doubt.
The first week’s work on the football field, as every one knows, is
largely concerned with the individual elements of the game,—tackling,
dropping on the ball, running down under punts, charging. Through these
Dunn’s self-confidence and previous experience carried him with flying
colors. He threw himself on the ball with admirable spirit; and the way
in which he scampered down the field after punts, getting the direction
of the kick by a single, quick, accurate glance over his shoulder, and
fairly hugging the waiting receiver, was a joy to the beholder. In open
work he was not quite so successful. He missed a few hard tackles, but
he made some good ones, and the balance remained in his favor. Talbot
was so malevolent as to remark that Dunn got the smaller fellows and let
the big ones by, but Talbot was from aye a surly growler. The opinion
which Dunn himself delivered in the dressing rooms after the first
tackling practice found by far the wider acceptance.
“Nobody can tackle in the open in cold blood,” he averred. “A fellow
might get his man every time in a game when he feels the excitement and
forgets everything but the play, and yet miss every tackle when you put
him out to show what he can do. There was a half-back we had in school
who afterwards made the Dartmouth eleven; he couldn’t make one out of a
dozen of those practice tackles. They’re dangerous, too. If I was a
coach, I’d cut ’em out altogether.”
After the middle of the week there were short line-ups in which Dunn
played left end. Behind him was all the superior weight and prestige of
the first backs, and before him as opposing tackle only “Skinny”
Fairbanks, who had barely made the third the year before. Dunn’s work
here was of the lively, striking kind that sets partial spectators agog
with delight. He shoved Fairbanks back for holes as if Fairbanks were a
dummy. When the ball by way of variety was given to the second, he lay
outside like a keen-eyed bird of prey and fell upon the fearful
seconders with a sudden, calamitous swoop. Hardie stood on the
side-lines the day before the first real game, and reproached himself
for a feeling of envy. Apparently he and Dunn had started fair in school
but a few days before, and now Dunn was leagues beyond him. He felt
inclined to send word to the dilatory outfitter that he shouldn’t want
any football clothes at all.
Then on the first Saturday came the game with the Suffolk school, which
Newbury had just soundly beaten. It was a discouraging contest that took
the fire out of the hearts of the players and set the school to jesting
about the team. Westcott’s won in the last five minutes through a long
run by Harrison, who got the ball on a fumble and carried it half the
length of the field; but the record of six to nothing looked very small
alongside of Newbury’s twenty-six to eight. The plan of the coach had
been to push the attack generally through the left side of the line
behind Eaton and Dunn; and when Suffolk had the ball to concentrate the
secondary defence behind centre and right, leaving the strong wing to
make its own resistance. The scheme did not work, and after much waste
of time was abandoned. Holes did not develop where they were expected,
and Suffolk pounded the left with great success. The fault was not easy
to place. Dunn seemed so devoted to playing a safe outside that he
rarely got into the path of the Suffolk runner; and the Suffolk right,
it was generally conceded, had been greatly strengthened since the
Newbury game. Two bad fumbles that lost Westcott the ball at critical
moments were charged against Horr, the half-back.
“You could have saved us the ball both times if you’d only dropped quick
enough!” Talbot remarked with undisguised frankness to Dunn, as the team
walked moodily into the dressing rooms after the game.
“I couldn’t, really!” protested Dunn. “Once some one piled into me just
as I was going to drop, and the other time I tried to pick it up because
I had a clear field, and my foot slipped. It was the correct thing to
do, wasn’t it, Harry?”
“I didn’t see,” answered the captain. “I thought you might have got
Jefferson, though, on that crisscross.”
“The end blocked me off just as I was going to tackle. Eaton really
ought to have taken him.”
“It’s your business not to be blocked off!” snapped Talbot.
“Shut up, Pete!” called the captain. “What’s the good of kicking now?
None of us played well.”
“My playing was rotten, I know,” rejoined the pessimist, “but I don’t
shirk the responsibility for it.”
“It takes time for a team to get shaken together,” said Dunn. “We’ll all
do better when we’ve had more practice.”
Dunn’s remark showed a forgiving and conciliatory spirit that by all the
rules of story-book morality should have extracted from a contrite
Talbot an apology; but the surly half-back went his way unappeased.
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