CHAPTER XXVI

THE HARVARD CREW ALSO SUFFERS.

At Gale’s Ferry, on Sunday morning, the scene was one of great activity. Men who turn into bed at nine o’clock, or ten by the latest, get all the sleep they want by a pretty early hour in the morning, and six o’clock saw the Yale oarsmen tumbling out of bed, and shouting merrily to one another as they got into their bathing suits. Then there was a quick rush down to the float, and, one after another, they leaped overboard and splashed around in the water, enjoying their morning dip hugely.

Dick Merriwell and his two assistants were not far behind them, and for fifteen minutes there was a wild carnival in the river. The water was cold. For the time was June and the water had not had time to warm up thoroughly. But the young athletes didn’t mind that. Their bodies were hardened to water a good deal colder than that by their six months of vigorous training for the race that was now so close at hand. On the coming Thursday, they would know the result of all their labor. Then, in twenty minutes or so, the work they had been doing for so many weary months would be put to the test, and the greatest athletic event of the college year would be decided.

More than a hundred and fifty men had answered the first call for crew candidates the previous October in New Haven, when Dick Merriwell had first called the men out for work. Then they had been divided up into squads of eight and set to work on machines in the tank, pulling at oars that were rigged so as to resemble exactly the arrangement of the oars in a racing shell, though all their pulling didn’t advance them an inch. Dick and the other coaches, working carefully, had hammered into all of them the principles of the Yale stroke, and, then, after the actual rowing practice, had come the long cross-country runs, beginning with a mile or two at first, and ending with ten-mile runs through the surrounding country, to perfect the wind.

Gradually, as time wore on and the effects of the coaching showed, the squad had been reduced. When spring training opened, as soon as the winter broke up, in New Haven harbor, a good many of the less promising men had been dropped, and the final cut had been made just before the crews came to Gale’s Ferry, three weeks before the day of the race. Now there were about thirty-seven oarsmen left in the squad. There was the first varsity crew, eight men, who represented, in the opinion of Dick Merriwell and the other coaches, the very pick of all the oarsmen in Yale, trained now to the very minute, and ready to do battle with eight men of Harvard, who had been selected after a similar ordeal.

To give this crew practice, there was the second varsity, eight men nearly as good. From this second crew, in case of any accident, substitutes would be picked for the first shell; and, under Dick’s coaching, it was almost as good as the varsity, and good enough, as all Yale men felt, to beat almost any other college crew in the country.

Next in importance to the varsity eight was the varsity four, scheduled to race for two miles with four men from Harvard, after the freshman eight had rowed its race against the Harvard youngsters. The Yale “Y” went to the members of both the four and the eight. And the oar he pulls in a race is thereafter the most valued possession of every college oarsman. He longs, as did these Yale men that Sunday, to have a stained and worn shirt to drape over it, trophy of victory, for it is an immemorial custom for the losers to toss their rowing shirts to the victors after the race, when both crews lie on their oars for a minute to rest before pulling away to quarters.

The Yale oarsmen finally emerged from the river and dashed up to the house to dry and get into other clothes. A quick rubdown with a rough towel, that set the blood tingling in their veins, then a hasty dressing, in tennis shoes, flannel trousers, and soft shirts—plenty of costume for such athletes in such a climate. And then came breakfast—a breakfast as big as they had earned. Great pitchers of milk, as many eggs as they could eat, steaks, and everything else of healthy food that they wanted. But no coffee and no tobacco.

The oarsmen themselves shared the wonder of the coaches at the poor performance of the varsity in the previous day’s brush with the freshmen. They knew that they had rowed well, but they knew also that they had not got the proper speed out of the shell in view of the strength of their efforts. And, after breakfast, while Dick Merriwell, whose arrival they had all hailed with joy, went into consultation with Benton and Hargreaves, they gathered around in groups to discuss it.

“Did you have any trouble following my pace?” asked Murchison of Flagg, who had the seat immediately behind him.

“Not a bit,” said Flagg. “I was pulling my arms out, but I could feel the blooming boat drag between the strokes every time. I can’t make it out at all.”

“You were rowing all right,” said little Rogers, the coxswain. “There wasn’t a thing the matter with the rowing anywhere in the boat—and you can bet I was watching pretty closely when I saw how those freshmen were pulling away from us. It was about the weirdest thing I ever saw—and I’ve sat in the coxswain’s seat often enough not to be surprised by most things that I see a racing crew do.”

“Well, Mr. Merriwell’s here,” said Flagg. “We’ll be all right now. If there’s anything wrong he’ll find out what it is. We can leave the worrying to him. Jim Phillips is some pitcher, isn’t he? I hope he gets here soon. I want to see him and shake hands with him. I’m glad he’s captain.”

“So’m I,” said Murchison heartily. “He’ll be a good one, and we ought to land another championship next year.”

Meanwhile, while the oarsmen talked and rested after their breakfast, Dick Merriwell and the other coaches were sitting at the far edge of the float, talking over the whole situation.

“I’ve looked over the shell,” said Dick, “and there’s not a thing wrong. The changes in the rigging that you told me you had made for Harper, at bow, are all right. His legs are longer than those of most men of his height, and it’s much better as you’ve fixed it. I thought for a moment there might have been some sort of funny business by some one who wanted to injure the crew.”

The other two were surprised. So Dick, suppressing details, and making a long story short, told them of the startling incidents of the week preceding the last games with Harvard.

He told them how an attempt had been made to prove that Gray and Taylor, the members of the senior battery, had cheated in an examination, that they might be prevented from playing against the crimson, and of the desperate trick by which Jim Phillips, Yale’s chief reliance in the box, had been lured into an empty freight car and locked in, so that he had been carried off in the car when the train had moved away. They exclaimed in surprise and disgust when he told them of the long chase after Jim, and his rescue just in time to get back and pitch Yale to victory, despite his exhaustion.

“We haven’t seen anything of that sort around here,” said Benton, “but, then, we haven’t been looking for it, either. We’ll have to keep our eyes open. Still, I don’t see how that thing yesterday could have been due to anything of the sort. It’s simply inexplicable, so far as I can see. Will you take the crew out to-day, Mr. Merriwell, and see what you make of it?”

“Yes,” said Dick. “We’ll take them out for a spin about eleven o’clock. Who’s this?”

There was a sudden put-put, and around the bend in the river a motor boat came puffing along.

“That’s the _John Harvard_,” said Hargreaves. “There’s Neilson in the bow. Coming to make a call, I guess. Nice chap, Neilson. Pity he went to Harvard.”

Neilson, the Harvard coach, hailed them from the bow of the Harvard coaching launch.

“Hello, Merriwell,” he said. “Glad to see you. I see you’ve put it up to us to score over Yale this spring. Good work—though I’m sorry, of course, that Harvard couldn’t have won the game. I came to see if one of you coaches didn’t want to go out and watch our time row this morning. Plenty of room in the launch—and we’re pretty tired, at Red Top, of all this secrecy about practice.”

“Thanks,” said the Yale coaches, in unison.

“Benton,” said Dick, “suppose you go along? I’ve got to get a look at our own crew, Neilson, or I’d accept for myself. I’ll be glad to take one of your fellows out in the _Elihu Yale_ if any of you care to come.”

“All right,” said Neilson, “I’ll send Thompson. Don’t feel you have to reciprocate—but I think this work of trying to conceal times and all that sort of thing is rot. It doesn’t fool any one, anyhow.”

“I’m with you there,” said Dick.

So Benton got into the _John Harvard_, and Thompson, one of the younger Harvard coaches, jumped ashore, and took his place in the Yale coaching launch half an hour later.

“Varsity and freshmen out!” called Dick, and the sixteen oarsmen, lifting their shells shoulder high, soon had them in the water, and took their places in the frail skiffs that were to carry them in the races.

“They’re a good-looking lot, Merriwell,” said Thompson, as he inspected the two crews critically.

They pulled slowly out from the float into deep water, obeying the orders of the coxswains, and then, at a word from Dick, swung out, with a long, powerful stroke, across the river, to the starting point on the opposite shore, close to the bank.

“Got a watch?” Merriwell asked Thompson, and lent him his own stop watch when he found that the Harvard man was not provided with a split-second timepiece.

“I’m going to give them a brush for a couple of miles,” said Dick, “and I want some sort of a rough idea of their time. If it isn’t too much trouble, I’d like to have you keep tabs on them——”

“Glad of the chance,” said Thompson, grinning. “This isn’t much like old times. I remember when I was a freshman we had the most complicated system of spies for getting times of your rows you ever saw. Used to have men stationed all along the bank, where we thought they couldn’t see us.”

Dick laughed, and then watched the two shells as they lined up.

“Ready, varsity?” he called. “Ready, freshmen? Ready all? Go!”

Sixteen oars met the water all at once, as it seemed, and in a moment the two shells were off. For a mile it was a pretty race. Then weight and experience told. The varsity drew steadily away from the freshman crew, and at the two-mile mark the big crew was a good two lengths in the lead.

“Ten forty-nine,” said Thompson, snapping his watch. “That’s good enough to beat us, Merriwell, and I don’t mind saying so. Murchison didn’t go above thirty-four to the minute at all, except for half a minute at the end.”

“I’m satisfied,” said Dick. “That’s a pretty good crew.”

He wondered more than ever what could have been the matter the day before. There had been no sign of any of the trouble that Benton and Hargreaves had spoken of. Thompson knew nothing of that, of course, and Dick saw no reason for telling him of it. He took the Harvard man down to Red Top in the launch, while the crew paddled back to quarters easily, and at the Harvard boathouse, he picked up Benton, who had been watching the Harvard trial.

“Well, what seems to be the matter?” asked Benton, who was laboring under some suppressed excitement.

“Not a thing,” said Dick. “They rowed like record breakers. I don’t see how the dickens there could have been all that trouble yesterday.”

“Well,” said Benton, “I’ve got another surprise for you. That Harvard crew was up against exactly the same sort of trouble to-day that we were yesterday. They rowed beautifully, but their boat just naturally stood still between the strokes. It was bad in the first two miles. Then, in the third, they got better, but toward the end it was simply rotten. Neilson was half wild. He couldn’t make it out at all. It’s enough to give you the willies. If they had done any bad rowing, I could understand it. But it was just the same as with us. Their rowing was simply perfect.”

The two coaches looked at each other hard, without speaking for a minute. They were both thoroughly experienced oarsmen, but the experiences of the two crews was something that nothing they had ever seen enabled them to account for.

“There’s something funny going on here,” said Dick, a worried frown between his brows. “I can’t see any light now, but I’m going to keep on looking until I do. It’s the strangest thing I ever heard of in my whole experience as an oarsman—and that extends over several years.”