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Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited as _italic_. Bold characters are delimited as
=bold=.
The few footnotes have been moved to follow the paragraphs in which they
are referenced.
IN THE LINE
=The Phillips Exeter Series.=
--------------
BY ALBERTUS T. DUDLEY.
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=FOLLOWING THE BALL.=
Illustrated by CHARLES COPELAND. Price,
$1.25.
=MAKING THE NINE.=
Illustrated by CHARLES COPELAND and from
Photographs of Scenes at Exeter. Price,
$1.25.
=IN THE LINE.=
Illustrated by CHARLES COPELAND. Price,
$1.25.
[Illustration: DOWN THE TWO WENT IN A WHIRL OF LEGS.—_Page 290._]
PHILLIPS EXETER SERIES
----------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE LINE
BY
ALBERTUS T. DUDLEY
AUTHOR OF “FOLLOWING THE BALL” AND “MAKING
THE NINE”
_ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES COPELAND_
[Illustration]
BOSTON.
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD COMPANY.
Published, August, 1905.
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_All Rights Reserved_
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IN THE LINE.
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
TO MY ADVISERS AND HELPERS
F. P. D. AND W. P. D.
PREFACE
IN THE LINE is a story of school life and football rather than of
football and school life. In its football it is meant to supplement
FOLLOWING THE BALL, as WITH MASK AND MIT in its baseball will supplement
MAKING THE NINE, each book emphasizing a different department of play.
The story is in no sense history, and no attempt has been made to
describe actual persons.
The case for football presented in Chapters XX and XXII is believed to
be a fair and candid statement of facts with regard to the game as they
are known to those most familiar with it. American Rugby football is
here, and here to stay, not because of its æsthetic virtues, but because
it appeals irresistibly to the Anglo-Saxon heart. In twenty years,
against ignorant criticism and bitter opposition, it has established
itself in every section of the country. It has merits which can neither
be argued away nor overborne by abuse; it has conspicuous faults.
Eliminate “dirty football” and the playing of unfit or unfairly matched
men, provide for the players proper supervision in their practice and
strict officials in their matches,—and the dangers of the game, with all
serious grounds of objection, will be removed.
Particular thanks for helpful suggestions as to guard play are due Mr.
Joseph T. Gilman, a veteran of the Dartmouth eleven, whose mastery of
the technique of his position has been proved in many a hard contest and
against many a clever antagonist.
ALBERTUS T. DUDLEY.
BOSTON, April, 1905.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
RAW MATERIAL 1
CHAPTER II
ACQUAINTANCES 12
CHAPTER III
THE NEW MANDOLIN 25
CHAPTER IV
WEIGHED AND MEASURED 33
CHAPTER V
IN THE GYMNASIUM 42
CHAPTER VI
INDUSTRIES OF THE TWINS 52
CHAPTER VII
NO THOROUGHFARE 64
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICS 75
CHAPTER IX
THE CONCERT AT EASTHAM 84
CHAPTER X
VICTIMS 105
CHAPTER XI
BUYING TACKS 113
CHAPTER XII
THE HALO FADES 124
CHAPTER XIII
RED RETRIBUTION 136
CHAPTER XIV
PATRON AND CLIENT 150
CHAPTER XV
THE SILENT PARTNER 164
CHAPTER XVI
A CELEBRATION 181
CHAPTER XVII
BACK AGAIN 194
CHAPTER XVIII
FOOTBALL 207
CHAPTER XIX
MORE FOOTBALL 219
CHAPTER XX
A ROUND ROBIN 231
CHAPTER XXI
A LOOPHOLE 240
CHAPTER XXII
EXPERT OPINION 252
CHAPTER XXIII
THE FIRST HALF 263
CHAPTER XXIV
THE GAME ENDS 284
CHAPTER XXV
ON THE WAY HOME 297
ILLUSTRATIONS
Down the two went in a whirl of legs _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Durand ... walked deliberately back to the 47
cushioned space
“Pick up that hat, do you hear!” 118
The pile that covered the ball three yards beyond 271
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IN THE LINE
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CHAPTER I
RAW MATERIAL
Wolcott Lindsay Senior, with Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and Wolcott
Junior’s Mamma, arrived in Boston on New Year’s day, after buffeting for
sixty hours against a furious northwest storm that left the great
ice-coated liner looking like a glass ship taken from a globe on the
nursery shelf and magnified a thousand times. Wolcott Junior, being a
healthy, vigorous youth, with thousands of footpounds of energy running
hourly to waste, and having the overweening confidence in his own powers
which distinguishes some otherwise very attractive specimens of American
boyhood, had found the restraint of the cabin extremely irksome. Had the
voyage lasted much longer, he must have discovered some means of getting
by the barriers which kept him in safe imprisonment. In that case there
might have been no Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and no story of “In the Line”
to be written.
“Junior,” as his mother called him, was not one to slip by a sentinel
unobserved. Five feet eleven in height, unshod; one hundred seventy-five
pounds in weight, unclothed; with heart and lungs unstrained by growth,
and muscles already swelling in significant bunches and bands, he looked
more like a college junior than a raw boy not yet eighteen, still unripe
for entrance examinations.
“Ridiculous,” his father had said, lifting his eyes from their
five-foot-six-inch level and measuring the whole length and breadth of
his offspring,—“perfectly ridiculous to be so big! Why, if you keep on
at this rate you’ll be as much out of place in an average house as a
rhinoceros in a garret. And not yet even a sub-freshman!”
“Now, Wolcott!” expostulated Mrs. Lindsay, “you know that’s not fair. If
you had told us we were going to stay in Hamburg two years instead of
six months, we should have put him in a good school or had a tutor for
him. It isn’t his fault if he’s behind; he hasn’t had a fair chance.”
At this the expression on the face of Lindsay père changed. “He shall
have chance enough when we get home. No more conversation lessons in
French and German, or reading novels for vocabulary, or going to the
theatre for pronunciation, or rowing on the Elster with that learned
fool, Herr Doktor Krauss; but old-fashioned Latin and Greek and
mathematics in some good, stiff school, under a clear-headed American
teacher. Too bad that the boy couldn’t have had a touch of the Hamburger
Gymnasium!”
At this suggestion that hard things were in store for the young man,
Mrs. Lindsay looked worried, and Junior assumed an air of indifference
that cloaked his real feeling, which was one of joy to be coming home
again to boys of his own race and kind, and of willingness to put up
with any school or any work, however “stiff,” so long as it was American
and with Americans.
Aunt Emmeline met them at the dock. Aunt Emmeline was Mr. Lindsay’s
sister, like him and yet differing from him as sisters are wont to
differ from brothers. Both were in a sense aristocrats; both thought
much of the family name and the family history, but their points of view
were widely variant. Mr. Lindsay felt strongly that the possession of
ancestors who had served their generation faithfully and well, pledged
the descendants to the same ratio of achievement. His constant fear was
that he should fail to maintain the standard which the forefathers had
set. Aunt Emmeline, on the other hand, regarded the family past as a
legacy bequeathed for the glorification of the present. Gentle and
charitable and good, she yet loved to think of the Lindsays as an
essentially superior race, whom it behooved to keep themselves aloof
from the common modern herd, and contemplate in reverence the ancient
family greatness.
Both Mr. Lindsay and his sister were experts in the family genealogy.
The brother loved to tell of the Lindsay who left a comfortable English
benefice to guide a little flock in the wilderness; of the farmer who,
with his two sons, ambushed a dozen Indians who attacked his house in
the Pequot wars; of the young lieutenant who followed the desperate
fortunes of Paul Jones, and was cut in two by a cannon-ball from the
_Serapis_. Miss Emmeline took little interest in the pioneers and the
farmers of the family tree. Her tales were of the laces and jewels of
Barbara Wolcott, wife of the attorney-general; of the splendid plate
lost in the mansion of the great-great-uncle in New Jersey, when
pillaged by the Hessians; of the fine estate of the one Tory member of
the family, whose daughter became the wife of Lord Stanley of Stanley
Hall, Roebuckshire. Aunt Emmeline hoped that Wolcott would exemplify the
fine manners and superior breeding of his be-ruffled ancestors; Mr.
Lindsay that he might show some traces of the good sense, courage, and
sterling worth of the builders and defenders of the colony. And in this
hulking, overgrown fellow, no longer a boy and not yet a man, both felt
some disappointment.
A few days were required to get the family used to solid earth again,
and for picking up the threads of existence severed two years before.
Meantime Mr. Lindsay made inquiries for a school for his son. He himself
believed in the public schools, not as some of his neighbors, in theory
and for other people’s children, but in theory and for his own. Mr.
Lindsay had ever the courage of his convictions. So strong was this
faith that Mrs. Lindsay, who favored a private school, and Aunt
Emmeline, who adored St. Susan’s, had each abandoned her own pet scheme
for “little Wolcott,” in the conviction that the public school was
inevitable. When, therefore, the head of the family returned one day
with the news that Junior, on account of the irregularity of his
previous training, and the inflexible system which the public schools
maintained, could not prepare at the Latin School without great loss of
time, the discussion of schools over Junior’s head, or rather under his
nose, became serious. With the public school out of the field, each lady
thought to see her own choice adopted. Miss Emmeline’s arguments, boiled
down, were that Dr. Cummin, at the head of St. Susan’s, was “such a good
man” and some very nice boys went there,—boys, that is, of approved
mothers and grandfathers,—and they certainly came back with lovely
manners. Mrs. Lindsay urged that the private school offered good
instruction, the companionship of boys of the neighborhood, and what was
to her of much more account, the opportunity to keep the fledgling a
little longer at home. Mr. Lindsay listened, questioned, and like a wise
man took time to consider and talk with his friends.
And here was the undoing of both the fond mamma and the solicitous aunt.
Mr. Lindsay met Friend Number One at his club at luncheon.
“Do you know anything about schools?” asked the father. “I am looking
for the best place in which to put my son. I hear that St. Susan’s is
very highly recommended.”
Number One looked at him a moment in thoughtful silence. “Do you? Yes, I
suppose some people must recommend it.”
“I infer that you do not. What do you know against it?”
“I know this,” replied the man, energetically; “my nephew entered
Harvard last fall from St. Susan’s with a reputation for piety and
goodness that any saint might have envied. In three months that fellow
had gone to pieces in the temptations of the unaccustomed life like a
rotten ship dashed by a hurricane against a reef. He was about as well
fitted for the freedom the college offers as I am for the prize ring.
Why don’t you put your boy into a good private school right here in the
city?”
A little later Mr. Lindsay fell in with Friend Number Two. “Do you know
anything about private schools in Boston?”
“Private schools? Yes, there are two or three good ones here,—a little
snobbish, of course, but good schools none the less. Ask Tom Smith about
them. He’s got two boys in one of them.”
But Mr. Lindsay had no intention of consulting Tom Smith. Snobbishness
was his pet aversion; the very mention of the possibility aroused a
vehement prejudice. Without stopping to inquire whether the charge were
true or false, he abandoned all thought of a private school for the
lordly Wolcott Junior, and drifted on to Friend Number Three with mind
swept clear of all prepossessions.
Friend Number Three had positive convictions. He was an enthusiastic
partisan of the rah-rah sort, alive to the merits and blind to the
faults of the school of his boyhood. He knew exactly the place for
Wolcott Junior, democratic, cosmopolitan, of high standard of
scholarship, with a system of government tending to develop moral
independence, and boasting a history rich in names of men of action and
service. It happened that the merits which the loyal alumnus ascribed to
Seaton were precisely those which Mr. Lindsay thought it most important
that a school should possess. It happened also that the next two men
consulted gave opinions which either negatively or positively supported
Number Three. As a result and despite the preferences of the ladies of
the family, Wolcott’s school future was determined. Within a week after
his arrival in Boston he was packing his trunk for Seaton.
It need hardly be said that this method of selecting a school, while
unquestionably typical, would not always lead to the same result. Friend
Number Four, for example, might have contradicted Number Three and
Number One, and by lauding St. Susan’s to the skies, have sent the son
of the house to the school of Aunt Emmeline’s choice. Or, if the case
had been thoroughly investigated, the private school might easily have
won the favorable decision. As it was, Mr. Lindsay, in considering the
boy and his needs as well as his own ideals, proceeded rather more
rationally than the average parent. Many a boy is placed in a particular
school merely on the strength of a specious advertisement. Some are
ejected from home rather than sent to school, the destination being of
much less consequence to the selfish parents than their own relief from
responsibility. Others again, through unwholesome dread of evil
influences, are turned over to a family of under-masters who wait on
them and think for them and keep them in prolonged infancy. But these
are extremes of neglect or solicitude. In the end the school is but the
opportunity, the vital force is the boy. If the boy is wrong, no school
can make him right. Given the right boy in the hands of competent,
conscientious men, and the form of the school makes little difference.
So thought Mr. Lindsay as he said good-by to his strapping son at Seaton
station; and he boarded the train with a clear conscience.