THE TROUBLE WITH THE CREW.
Dick reached New London, and was at Gale’s Ferry, the Yale rowing
quarters, before the assistant coaches who had been left in charge of
the crew had smoked their final pipes for the night. The oarsmen were
all in bed, early hours being the strict rule for them. But, on the
porch of the cottage in which the coaches lived, Dick found Hargreaves
and Benton, his two graduate helpers, deep in talk.
“By Jove, I’m glad to see you, Mr. Merriwell!” cried Benton. “We heard
that motor boat puffing up the river, but I hardly thought you’d get
here before to-morrow. See any signs of mourning as you passed Red Top?”
They all laughed. Red Top was the name of the little cluster of cottages
and boathouses half a mile or so below, where the Harvard oarsmen had
for years made their quarters.
“No,” said Dick, with a smile. “I suppose they don’t feel very cheerful.
Still, they’ve got a chance to come back at us. If they win here,
they’ll be willing to let us have the baseball title to ourselves, I
guess, without feeling very bad about it.”
Benton pointed to a smoldering fire not far away.
“We had a little bonfire here ourselves when we heard the news,” he
said. “Gee! I’d like to have seen that game. That ninth inning must have
been enough to give you heart failure.”
“I haven’t got over it yet,” admitted Dick Merriwell, as he settled
comfortably back in his chair. “I suppose you haven’t heard many
details.”
“Just the bare score by innings,” said Hargreaves. “I called up a couple
of chaps at the club in New York, but they were so hoarse from yelling
that they couldn’t make me understand. They tried to describe it to me,
but all I could hear was that we won by a triple play in the ninth
inning, when the bases were full, with none out.”
“Well, that was the gist of it all,” said Dick. “It could be told in a
lot more words—but that’s what’s important.”
However, they would not be satisfied until he had described the whole
game for them, telling how Jim Phillips, the newly elected captain of
the varsity baseball team, had managed, although worn out and almost
exhausted, to save the day for Yale when a Harvard victory seemed
absolutely certain.
“Now,” he said, when he had finished, “tell me about the crew. I’m
anxious to hear about that. I should have been here last week, but the
baseball championship seemed mighty important, and I knew the crew was
in good hands as long as you two were on the job.”
The two assistants seemed much pleased by the compliment. They were
young graduates, both captains of Yale crews in their time, and
thoroughly versed in the Yale stroke and the Yale system of rowing, as
Bob Cook and John Kennedy had, in different ways, developed it. Dick
Merriwell, himself a fine and powerful oarsman, was also an expert in
technical watermanship. He had studied the rigging of a shell for an
eight-oared sweep race under the greatest masters: Courtney, of Cornell;
Rice, of Columbia, and men of similar stamp; and he had evolved for this
year’s Yale crew a stroke rather different from that of any of its
predecessors.
He had felt willing to do this because he had tried the stroke out the
year before with the freshman crew, with good results, and some of the
members of that same freshman crew were on this year’s varsity.
Murchison, the stroke, who captained the crew, was a veteran, and so was
Flagg at number seven, the seat immediately behind that of the stroke,
and the second man in the boat in importance.
In an eight-oared shell, such as the varsity races of to-day are rowed
in, each man handles a single oar, and four are on one side of the boat,
four on the other. Stroke sets the pace for the men who swing on the
same side of the boat directly, and, in a way, for all eight rowers. But
the men on the other side must take the beat from number seven, who
must, therefore, be able to follow stroke with the utmost exactness, for
the speed of a shell depends altogether upon the unison of the oarsmen.
They must row in time, or the boat will drag and check badly.
Going at racing speed, a boat should cover its own length, of about
sixty feet, in something like four seconds. A single break may make that
time five seconds more, so it is easy to see how important it is for
every man to row in time.
There was some hesitation, as Dick Merriwell could see, in the answer of
Benton and Hargreaves to his question about the condition of the crew.
Each seemed to hang back to let the other answer, and Dick was
immediately much concerned.
“Is there anything wrong?” he said. “If so, you should have let me
know.”
“Nothing exactly wrong,” said Benton finally. “But we’re a little
puzzled, and there’s no use denying that. We had a time trial last
Wednesday, as you know. We took them downstream, from quarters here to
the railroad bridge, using the flags for the course. Four of us caught
them in twenty minutes twenty-one seconds, which was remarkable time.
The tide was good, of course, but it was very hot. I never saw a Yale
crew work better. The best we’ve heard of Harvard, under conditions
that, if anything were better, was twenty-one minutes flat for the
course—also downstream. Murchison was right up to top form—the whole
crew worked like a machine. But here’s the sequel.”
Hargreaves broke in excitedly.
“Yes,” he said, “here’s the sequel! The Harvard people had a day off
this afternoon, to get returns on the game. I thought, and Benton agreed
with me, that it was better not to let the fellows get their minds on
the baseball game too much. So we took the freshmen and the varsity out
and gave them a two-mile brush, at full speed, racing start and all
racing conditions, to the navy yard—the same course the freshmen will
row next week. And—the freshmen finished three lengths ahead.”
“What?” exclaimed the universal coach, in amazement. “What was the
time?”
“Ten minutes fifty-nine seconds,” said Benton gloomily. “And the varsity
made the two miles in their trial row last Wednesday in ten
thirty-three. Now, how are you going to account for that?”
“That time’s all right for the freshmen,” said Dick slowly. “They’ll
take a lot of beating if they do as well as that against Harvard. But I
don’t understand the varsity. Of course, it’s not a two-mile crew—but
they ought to have done as well as in their time trial. How were the
water conditions?”
“Not more than twenty seconds slower for the whole course,” said
Hargreaves. “I rowed over the course in a pair oar with Murchison later,
to see how it was.”
“Anything wrong?” asked Dick. “Any one man off his form?”
“No,” said Benton. “They rowed just as well as they did before. Form all
right—stroke absolutely correct. Simply didn’t have the speed and the
steam that the freshmen put in. They worked hard. The boat seemed to
hang more than it did—that was enough to account for the slower time.
What I can’t account for is the check. There was almost no run at all
between strokes. It’s got us guessing. That was why we were so glad to
see you heave in sight when you did to-night.”
Dick looked at his watch.
“Time to turn in,” he said. “I’m not strong for Sunday rowing, but we’ll
have to have them out to-morrow and see what’s wrong. It certainly
sounds like a Chinese puzzle, to hear you describe it. But I guess
there’ll be some way to explain it when we get right down to cases.”
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