As the school year rolled on toward its finish in June, times became
busier and busier for the students, especially for the Lakerimmers,
who felt a great responsibility upon their shoulders, the
responsibility of keeping the Lakerim Athletic Club pennant flying
to the fore in all the different businesses of academic life--in the
classroom, at the prize speaking, in the debating society, and, most
of all, in the different athletic affairs.
It was no longer necessary, as it had been at home in Lakerim, for the
same twelve men to play all the games known to humanity--to make a
specialty of everything, so to speak. At Kingston, while they were
still one body and soul, and kept up their union with constant powwows
in one another's rooms, but most often in Tug's, they were divided
variously among the athletic teams, where each one felt that his own
honor was Lakerim's.
Their motto was the motto of the Three Musketeers: "All for one, and
one for all."
The springtime athletics found the best of them choosing between the
boat crew and the ball team. It was a hard choice for some of them
who loved to be Jacks-at-all-trades, but a choice was necessary. The
Kingston Academy possessed so many good fellows that not all of the
Dozen found a place on the eight or the nine; still, there were
enough of them successful to keep Lakerim material still strongly in
evidence.
Of the men that tried for the crew, all were sifted out, gradually,
except B.J., Quiz, and Punk. The training was a severe one, under a
coach who had graduated some years before from Kingston, and had come
back to bring his beloved Academy first across the line, as it had
gone the year he had captained the crew.
As the training went on, the man who had been elected captain of the
eight worked so faithfully--or overworked so faithfully--that he was
trained up to the finest point some two or three weeks before the
great regatta of academies. Every day after that he lost in form, in
spite of himself, and the coach had finally to make him abdicate the
throne; and Punk, who had worked in his usual slow and conservative
fashion, seemed the fittest man to succeed him. So Punk became captain
of the crew, and found himself at the old post of stroke-oar.
On the day of the great Henley of the Interscholastic League, when all
the crews had got away in their best style, after two vexatious false
starts, Punk slowly, and without any impatience, urged his crew past
all the others, till Kingston led them all.
From this place he could study his rivals well, and after some
shifting of positions, he saw the Troy Latin School eight coming
cleanly out of the parade and making swiftly after him. Suddenly a
great nervousness seized him, because he remembered the time, the year
before, when the Lakerim crew rowed Troy, and when his oar had broken
just before the finish, so that he had been compelled to jump out into
the water, and had missed the joy of riding over the line with his
winning Lakerimmers. He wondered now if this oar would also play him
false.
But he had selected it with experienced care, and hard as he strained
it, and pathetically as it groaned, it stood him in good stead,
and carried him, and the seven who rowed with him, safely into the
paradise of victory.