Barbour Ralph Henry
The Turner Twins

CHAPTER V – IN THE PERFORMANCE OF DUTY

School began in earnest the next morning. Ned and Laurie were awakened from a deep slumber by the imperative clanging of a gong. There were hurried trips to the bath-room, and finally a descent to the recreation-room and morning prayers. Breakfast followed in the pleasant, sunlit dining-hall, and at half-past eight the twins went to their first class. There wasn’t much real work performed that morning, however. Books were bought and, being again in possession of funds, Ned purchased lavishly of stationery and supplies. He had a veritable passion for patent binders, scratch-pads, blank-books, and pencils, and Laurie viewed the result of a half-hour’s mad career with unconcealed concern.

“You’re all wrong, Ned,” he said earnestly. “We aren’t opening a stationery emporium. Besides, we can’t begin to compete with the office. They buy at wholesale, and – ”

“Never mind the comedy. You’ll be helping yourself to these things soon enough, and then you won’t be so funny.”

“That’s the only way they’ll ever get used up! Why, you’ve got enough truck there to last three years!”

There was one interesting annual observance that morning that the twins witnessed inadvertently. At a little after eight the fellows began to assemble in front of School Hall. Ned and Laurie, joining the throng, supposed that it was merely awaiting the half-hour, until presently there appeared at the gate a solitary youth of some fourteen years, who came up the circling drive about as joyfully as a French Royalist approaching the guillotine. Deep silence prevailed until the embarrassed and unhappy youth had conquered half of the interminable distance. Then a loud “Hep!” was heard, and the throng broke into a measured refrain:

“Hep! – Hep! – Hep! – Hep!”

This was in time to the boy’s dogged steps. A look of consternation came into his face and he faltered. Then, however, he set his jaw, looked straight ahead, and came on determinedly.

“Hep! – Hep!”

Up the steps he passed, a disk of color in each cheek, looking neither to right nor left, and passed from sight. As he did so, the chorus changed to a good-humored laugh of approval. Ned made inquiry of a youth beside him.

“Day boy,” was the explanation. “There are ten of them, you know: fellows who live in town. We always give them a welcome. That chap had spunk, but you wait and see some of them!”

Two more followed together, and, each upheld in that moment of trial by the presence of the other, passed through the ordeal with flying colors. But the twins noted that the laughing applause was lacking. After that, the remaining seven arrived almost on each other’s heels and the air was filled with “Heps!” Some looked only surprised, others angry; but most of then grinned in a sickly, embarrassed way and went by with hanging heads.

“Sort of tough,” was Ned’s verdict, and Laurie agreed as they followed the last victim inside.

“It looks as if day students weren’t popular,” he added.

Later, though, he found that he was wrong. The boys who lived in the village were accepted without reservation, but, naturally enough, seldom attained to a full degree of intimacy with those who lived in the dormitories.

By afternoon the twins had become well shaken down into the new life, had made several superficial acquaintances, and had begun to feel at home. Of Kewpie Proudtree they had caught but fleeting glimpses, for that youth displayed a tendency to keep at a distance. As the hour of four o’clock approached, Ned became more and more worried, and his normally sunny countenance took on an expression of deep gloom. Laurie kept close at his side, fearing that courage would fail and Ned would bring disgrace to the tribe of Turner. But Laurie ought to have known better, for Ned was never what his fellows would have called a “quitter.” Ned meant to see it through. His mind had retained very little of the football lore that his brother had poured into it the night before, but he had, at least, a somewhat clearer idea of the general principles of the game. He knew, for instance, that a team comprised eleven players instead of the twelve he had supposed, and that certain restrictions governed the methods by which you might wrest the ball from an opponent. Thus, you could not legally snatch it out of his arms, nor trip him up in the hope that he would drop it. Ned thought the restrictions rather silly, but accepted them.

The athletic field, known in school parlance as the play-field, was even larger than it had looked from their windows. It held two gridirons and three baseball diamonds, as well as a quarter-mile track and ten tennis-courts. There was also a picturesque and well-appointed field-house and a fairly large grand stand. To Ned’s relief, most of the ninety students were in attendance, though only about forty of the number were in playing togs. Ned’s idea was that among so many he might escape close observation.

He had, of course, handled a football more or less, and he was possessed of his full share of common sense. Besides, he had perhaps rather more than his share of assurance. To his own surprise, if not to Laurie’s, he got through the hour and a half of practice very creditably. Seasoned candidates and novices were on the same plane to-day. There was, first of all, a talk by the coach. Mr. Mulford was a short, broad, good-humored man of about thirty, with a round and florid countenance, which possibly accounted for the nickname of “Pinky” that the school had affectionately awarded him. His real name was Stephen, and he had played guard, and played it well, for several years with Trinity College. This was his fourth season as football coach at Hillman’s and his third as baseball coach. So far he had been fairly successful in both sports.

His talk was brief and earnest, although he smiled through it all. He wanted lots of material, but he didn’t want any fellow to report for practice who didn’t mean to do his level best and stick it out. Those who were afraid of either hard work or hard knocks had better save their time and his. Those who did report would get a fair trial and no favor. He meant to see the best team this fall that Hillman’s School had ever turned out, one that would start with a rush and finish with a bang, like a rocket!

“And,” he went on, “I want this team made up the way a rocket is. A rocket is filled with stars, fellows, but you don’t realize it until the final burst. So we’re going to put the soft pedal on individual brilliancy this year. It almost had us licked last fall, as you’ll remember. This year we’re going to try hard for a well-rounded team of hard workers, fellows who will interlock and gear together. It’s the machine that wins, the machine of eleven parts that work all together in oil. We’re going to find the eleven parts first, and after that we’re going to do the oiling. All right now! Ten men to a squad. Get balls and pass in circles. Learn to hold the ball when you catch it. Glue right to it. And when you pass, put it where you want it to go. Don’t think that the work is silly and unnecessary, because it isn’t. A fellow who can’t hold a ball when it comes to him is of no use on this team. So keep your minds right on the job and your eyes right on the ball. All right, Captain Stevenson.”

At least, Ned could, to quote Laurie, “stand in a circle” and pass a football, and he did, and did it better than several others in his squad. In the same way, he could go after a trickling pigskin and catch it up without falling over himself, though it is possible that his “form” was less graceful than that of one or two of his fellows. When, later, they were formed in a line and started off by the snapping of the ball in the hands of a world-wearied youth in a faded blue sweater bearing a white H on its breast, Ned didn’t show up so well, for he was almost invariably one of the last to plunge forward. The blue-sweatered youth called his attention to the fact finally in a few well-chosen words.

“You guy in the brown bloomers!” he bellowed. (Of course they weren’t bloomers, but a pair of somewhat expansive golf breeches that Ned, lacking proper attire, had donned, not without misgivings, on Laurie’s advice.) “Are you asleep? Put some life into it! Watch this ball, and when you see it roll, jump! You don’t look like a cripple, but you surely act like one!”

Toward the end a half-dozen last-year fellows took to punting, but, to Ned’s relief, no one suggested that he take a hand at it, and at half-past five or thereabouts his trials came to an end. He went out of his way, dodging behind a group on the side-line, to escape Joe Stevenson, but ran plump into Frank Brattle instead.

“Hello, Turner,” Frank greeted. “How did it go?”

“All right,” replied Ned, with elaborate carelessness. “Fine.”

“Rather a nuisance having to go through the kindergarten stunts, isn’t it?” continued the other, sympathetically. “Mulford’s a great hand at what he calls the fundamentals, though. I dare say he’s right, too. It’s funny how easy it is to get out of the hang of things during the summer. I’m as stiff as a broom!”

“So am I,” answered Ned, earnestly and truthfully. Frank smiled, nodded, and wandered on, and Ned, sighting Laurie hunched up in the grand stand, joined him. “It’s a bully game, football,” he sighed, as he lowered himself cautiously to a seat and listened to hear his muscles creak. “Full of beneficial effects and all that.” Laurie grinned in silence. Ned felt experimentally of his back, frowned, rocked himself backward and forward twice, and looked relieved. “I guess there’s nothing actually broken,” he murmured, “I dare say it’ll be all right soon.”

“They say the first two months are the hardest,” responded Laurie, comfortingly. “After that there’s no sensation.”

Ned nodded. “I believe it,” he said feelingly. He fixed his gaze on the farther goal-post and after a minute of silence remarked:

“I’d like to catch the man who invented football!”

He turned a challenging look on his brother. Laurie blinked and for several seconds his lips moved noiselessly and there was a haunted look in his gray eyes. Then, triumphantly, he completed the couplet: “It may suit some, but it doesn’t suit all!”

“Rotten!” said Ned.

“I’d like to see you do any better,” answered Laurie, aggrievedly. “There isn’t any proper rhyme for ‘football,’ anyway.”

“Nor any reason for it, either. Of all – ”

“Hi, you fellow!” interrupted a scandalized voice. “What are you doing up there? Have you done your two laps?”

The speaker was a lanky, red-haired man who bristled with authority and outrage.

“Two laps?” stammered Ned. “No, sir.”

“Get at it, then. And beat it in when you have. Want to catch cold, do you? Sitting around without a blanket or anything like that!” The trainer shot a final disgusted look at the offender and went on.

“Gee,” murmured Ned, “I thought I was done! Two laps, he said! I’ll never be able to, Laurie!”

“Oh, yes, you will,” was the cheerful response. “And while you’re doing them you can think up a better rhyme for ‘football’ than I did!”

Ned looked back reproachfully as he limped to the ground and, having gained the running-track, set off at a stiff-kneed jog. Laurie’s expression relented as he watched.

“Sort of tough on the kid,” he muttered sympathetically. Then his face hardened again and he shook his head. “I’ve got to be stern with him, though!”

CHAPTER VI – NED IS FIRM

Kewpie Proudtree obeyed the shouted invitation to enter Number 16 and appeared with a countenance as innocent as that of an infant. “Hello, fellows,” he said cordially, dropping into a chair with indications of exhaustion. “How do you like it as far as you’ve gone?”

Ned shifted in his seat at the study-table, choking back a groan, and fixed Kewpie with a baleful look. “Listen, Proudtree,” he said sternly. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

“With me?” Kewpie stared in amazement. “What have I done?”

“You’ve got me into a fix, that’s what you’ve done! Didn’t you ask me – us – last night not to let on to Stevenson that we – I – couldn’t play football? Didn’t you say it would be a favor to you? Didn’t you say it would be all right and – and everything?”

“Sure! What of it?”

“Why, you crazy galoot, you must have told him that I knew all about the game! And you knew mighty well I didn’t! Stevenson thinks I’m a wonder, and I don’t know a touch-down from a – a forward kick!”

“Pass, not kick,” corrected Kewpie, patiently. “Look here, Turner – Say, are you Ned or Laurie? Blessed if I can tell!”

“Ned,” replied that youth, with much dignity.

“Guess I’ll have to call you Ned, then. Can’t call you both Turner. You understand. It was like this, Ned. You see, I want to stand in with Joe Stevenson. It – it’s for the good of the school. If they don’t play me at center this fall, who are they going to play? Well, Joe thought I – well, he seemed to think I hadn’t acted just right about keeping my weight down. He – he was sort of peeved with me. So I wanted to smooth him down a bit. You understand. That’s why I told him what I did.”

“Well, what did you tell him?”

“Why, I sort of – well, it wasn’t what I said exactly; it was what he thought I meant!”

“Proudtree, you’re telling a whopper,” said Ned, sternly. “And you told one to Stevenson, too, or I miss my guess.”

“I only said that you were a swell football-player.”

“For the love of lemons! What do you call that but a whopper?”

Kewpie looked both ashamed and distressed. He swallowed hard and glanced furtively at Laurie as though hoping for aid. But Laurie looked as unsympathetic as Ned. Kewpie sighed dolefully. “I – I suppose it was,” he acknowledged. “I didn’t think about that. I’m sorry, Ned, honest! I didn’t mean to tell what wasn’t so. I just wanted to get Joe’s mind off his troubles. You understand.”

“Well, you got me in a mess,” grumbled Ned. “I got by all right to-day, I suppose, but what’s going to happen to-morrow?”

Kewpie evidently didn’t know, for he stared morosely at the floor for a long minute. Finally, “I’ll go to Joe and fess up if – if you say so,” he gulped.

“I think you ought to,” responded Ned.

“Where’s the sense in that?” demanded Laurie. “What good would it do? Proudtree did fib, but he didn’t mean to. I mean he didn’t do it for harm. If he goes and tells Stevenson that he fibbed, Stevenson will have it in for him harder than ever; and he will have it in for you, too, Ned. Maybe he will think it was a scheme that you and Proudtree hatched together. That’s a punk idea, I say. Best thing to do is prove that Proudtree didn’t fib.”

“How?” asked Ned.

“Why, Proudtree – ”

“There’s an awful lot of that ‘Proudtree’ stuff,” complained the visitor. “Would you mind calling me Kewpie?”

“All right. Well, Kewpie told Captain Stevenson that you are a swell player. Go ahead and be one.”

“Huh, sounds easy the way you say it,” scoffed Ned; “but how can I, when I don’t know anything about the silly game? I wish to goodness you’d taken up football instead of me!”

“You got through to-day all right, didn’t you?” asked Laurie. “Well, keep it up. Keep your eyes open and learn. You can do it. You’re no fool, even if you haven’t my intellect. Besides, you’re the best little fakir that ever came over the range.”

“You can’t fake kicking a football,” said Ned, scathingly.

“Look here!” exclaimed Kewpie, his round face illumined by a great idea. “Tell you what, Ned! I’ll show you how to kick!”

The silence that greeted the offer might have offended a more sensitive youth, but Kewpie went on with enthusiasm. “Of course, I’m no wonder at it. I’m a little too short in the leg and, right now, I – I’m a bit heavy; but I used to kick and I know how it ought to be done. Say we have a half-hour or so at it every morning for a while?”

“Wouldn’t Stevenson know what was up?” asked Ned, dubiously.

“He needn’t know. We’ll go over to the lot behind the grammar school. Even if he saw us, he’d think we were having some fun.”

“He must have a strange idea of fun,” sighed Ned. “Still, if you want to take the trouble – ”

“Glad to! Besides, I owe you something for – for getting you in wrong. And I can put you wise to a lot of little things about handling a ball. We could do some passing, for instance. Wonder who’s got a ball we could borrow. I’ll find one somewhere. You understand. Now, what hour have you got free in the morning?”

A comparison of schedules showed that on two mornings a week the boys could meet at ten, and on two other mornings at ten-thirty. The remaining days were not accommodating, however.

“Well, even four times a week will show results,” said Kewpie, cheerfully. “This is Thursday. We’ll have the first lesson Saturday at ten.”

“I hope they don’t ask me to do any kicking before then,” said Ned.

“Not likely. You’ll get about the same stuff to-morrow as you had to-day. You’ll get by, take my word for it. That’s settled, then.” Kewpie referred to an ornate gold wrist-watch. “It’s after eight. You’re going over to Johnny’s, aren’t you!”

“Johnny’s?” repeated Laurie. “Oh, Doctor Hillman’s! I suppose so. What’s it like?”

“Oh, it isn’t bad. The eats are pretty fair. Anyway, he sort of likes the fellows to go, and he’s a good sort. You’ll be introduced to the faculty and their wives, if they have any, and meet a lot of fellows whose names you’ll forget the next minute. Take my advice and sort of work in toward the dining-room. Last year, the harlequin ice-cream gave out before I could get to the table.” Kewpie sighed. “Tabby has bully cake, too, and I’m off of cake. Isn’t that rotten luck?”

“Awful!” laughed Ned. “You going over now?”

“Yes. Come on and I’ll introduce you to some of the fellows you ought to know. I’ll wash my dirty paws and meet you in two minutes.”

The principal’s reception proved rather enjoyable. The “eats” were excellent and, under Kewpie’s guidance, the twins reached the long table in the dining-room well in advance of the crowd. As Laurie remarked afterward, it was worth the amount of trouble involved just to watch Kewpie’s mouth water as he gazed soulfully at the chocolate layer-cake. To his credit be it narrated that he manfully resisted it. Besides consuming much delectable food, the twins were impressively introduced by their guide to a number of their fellow-students, the introduction being prefaced in each case by a sort of biographical note, as: “There’s Dan Whipple. The tall fellow with the trick collar, talking to Mrs. Wells. Rows stroke on the crew. Senior class president. Honor man last year. President of Attic, too. Good chap to know. Come on.” In such manner they met at least a half-dozen school notables, most of whom were extremely affable to the new boys. Sometimes, to be sure, the twins had a suspicion that Kewpie was pretending a closer intimacy with a notable than in fact existed, but he always “got away with it.”

The only fly in the ointment of the evening’s enjoyment occurred when Kewpie mischievously introduced them to Mrs. Pennington, the wife of the Greek and Latin instructor, and sneaked away. Mrs. Pennington was tall and extremely thin, and viewed the world through a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. She had a high voice and what Ned termed a “very Lake Superior” manner, and, since she confined her conversation to the benefits to be derived from an earnest study of the Latin poets, philosophers, and historians, the twins were not happy. Fortunately, very little was demanded from them conversationally, Mrs. Pennington being quite competent to do all the talking. But, unfortunately, she gave them no chance to get away. Ned descried Kewpie grinning heartlessly from the doorway and rewarded him with a terrific and threatening scowl. Kewpie, however, waved blandly and faded into the night. Release came to them at last and they scurried away, neglecting, in their hurried departure, to say good night either to the doctor or Miss Tabitha, a breach of etiquette which probably passed unnoted by the hosts. Back in East Hall, the twins hammered loudly at Number 15, but Kewpie was either absent or discreet. At any rate, there was no response, and revenge had to be postponed.

To Laurie’s surprise, a notice on the bulletin-board in the corridor of School Hall the following morning announced that autumn baseball practice would begin that afternoon. He had supposed that his hour to offer himself on the altar of school patriotism would not arrive until the next spring; and later, when he strode down Walnut Street with Ned, in search of football togs for the latter, he broached the subject diplomatically.

“Funny idea to have baseball practice this time of year, I think,” he remarked carelessly. “Not much good in it. A fellow would forget anything he learned by next April.”

“Didn’t know they did,” replied Ned, uninterestedly. “Who told you that?”

“Oh, there was a notice on the board in School Hall. Don’t believe many fellows go out in the fall.”

“Thought baseball was a spring and summer game. Still, I dare say you can play it just as well now. Seems to me I’ve heard of having spring football practice, haven’t you?”

“I dare say. Crazy scheme, though, playing games out of season.”

“Ye-es.” Ned went on thoughtfully a moment Then he shot a suspicious glance at his brother. “You going out?” he demanded.

“N-no, I don’t think so,” answered Laurie, lightly. “There’s that building we had the bet on the other day. We never did find out – ”

“Never you mind about that building,” interrupted Ned, severely. “I’m on to you, partner. You’re trying to renege on baseball. Well, it doesn’t go! You’re a baseball hero and you’ve got to get busy!”

“Aw, Ned, have a heart! There’s plenty of time – ”

“No, sir, by jiminy! You got me slaving for the dear old school, now you do your bit!”

“Yes, but it isn’t fair to start the baseball season in September. You know it isn’t.”

“Cut out the alibis! You can get some baseball togs right now. Good thing you spoke of it. What’ll you need?”

“All I need is kindness,” wailed Laurie. “Ned, I don’t want to be a hero! I don’t want to save the dear old school from defeat in the ninth inning! I – I – ”

“You’re going to do as you agreed to,” answered Ned, grimly. “Remember that the honor of the Turners is at stake!”

Laurie sighed deeply. Then, “You speak of honor! Say no more. I yield,” he declaimed dramatically.

“You bet you do,” answered Ned, unhesitatingly. “You for the baseball field!”