CHAPTER VII

“THE RANCH”

It is human nature to dwell at length upon our successes and dismiss our failures with a word. The writer has given a chapter to the freshman game, but he is going to tell the story of the varsity contest, which occurred a week later, in a paragraph.

Robinson won in a clean, hard-fought game--11 to 0. Her rival never approached a score in either half, but by the grimmest sort of defensive work she managed to keep the final figures down to half of what they might have been had she gone to pieces for an instant. Hal played a brilliant game at full-back in that contest, and proved his right to the position. Thus the football season at Erskine ended in decisive defeat. It was an honorable defeat, to be sure; but, since at Erskine, as at other colleges in this country, they play more for the sake of winning than for love of the game, there were doleful faces a-plenty, and on Sunday the college had the appearance of a place smitten with the plague.

But Monday morning came and brought recitations and lectures, just as though there was no such thing as football, and the college settled back into the usual routine. At noon the sting of defeat was forgotten. At night, fellows were cheerfully discussing the chances for the next year. If we take defeat too hard, at least we recover quickly; there is hope for us in that.

Allan, for all that he was quite as patriotic as any, felt the defeat of the varsity team less than he did the cessation of track work. The latter left him at first feeling like a fish out of water. Tommy Sweet suggested that he might rig up a treadmill in his room and run to his heart’s content, like a squirrel in a wire cage. But Tommy wouldn’t promise to feed him all the peanuts he could eat, and so Allan refused to try the scheme. Instead, he spent much of his time out-of-doors and took long walks and runs out along the river or struck off westward to Millport.

On many of these excursions he was accompanied by Peter Burley. Peter--or more properly Pete, since that was the name he declared to be the proper one--Pete couldn’t be persuaded to do any running, but he was willing to walk any distance and in any direction, seeming to care very little whether he ever got back to Centerport or didn’t. And as his long legs took him over the ground about as fast as Allan could jog, the latter never suffered for want of exercise while in Pete’s company.

The friendship between the two had grown rapidly, until now Pete’s prophecy that they were to be “partners” had come true. The more Allan saw of the older boy the more he found to like, but just what the qualities were which drew him to Pete he would have found it hard to tell. The latter’s never-failing good-nature was undoubtedly one of them, but that alone was not accountable. Perhaps Pete would have experienced quite as much difficulty had he been called upon to say why he had been attracted by Allan the first time he had seen him, or why he had perseveringly sought his friendship ever since. The two were radically dissimilar, but even that isn’t sufficient to explain why each was attracted toward the other. Come to think of it, however, I don’t believe either Allan or Pete troubled himself about the problem, and so why should we?

Pete’s sudden leap into fame consequent upon his work against Robinson in the freshman game had left him unaffected. He had become a college hero in an hour, but none could see that it ever made any difference to him. He brushed congratulation aside good-naturedly and ridiculed praise.

“Stop your fool talk!” he would say. “I didn’t rope any steers. It was that little jack-rabbit, Poor, that whooped things up and won the game. I didn’t do a thing but shove ’em round some.” And when it was hinted that the shoving around was what brought victory, “Get out!” he would growl. “Science is what does the business, and I don’t know the first thing about the game.”

And so, while Peter was worshiped by the freshman class and very generally respected by the others, he wasn’t at all the popular conception of a college hero. And there were three fellows, at least, who liked him all the better for it.

Those three were Allan, Tommy, and Hal. Since that first meeting in Allan’s room, the four had been much together. Tommy showed up at the gatherings less frequently than any one of the others, for Tommy, in his own words, “had a lot of mighty difficult stunts to do.”

Sometimes the quartet met in Allan’s room, sometimes in Hal’s, less frequently in Tommy’s--for Tommy lived up two flights of stairs in McLean Hall, and Pete had a horror of climbing stairs. The only climbing he liked, he said, was climbing into a saddle. That was why he often found fault with his own apartments.

These were on the second floor of a plain clap-boarded building at the corner of Town Lane and Center Street, with the railroad but a few hundred feet distant and the fire-house next door. Pete declared he liked the noise, and could never study so well as when the switch-engine was shunting cars to and fro at the end of the lane or the fire-bell was clanging an infrequent alarm. As few ever saw him studying, the statement sounded plausible.

The ground floor of the building was occupied by a dealer in harness and leather; the third floor consisted of an empty loft. Across the lane--and the lane wasn’t wide enough to boast of--was a livery stable. On the opposite corner was a carriage repair-shop and warehouse. A few doors below was a wheelwright’s. The upper floors of the neighboring structures were occupied by carpenters, plumbers, roofers, and masons.

Through Pete’s windows, which were invariably open, be the weather what it might, floated in a strange and penetrating aroma--a mingled bouquet of coal-smoke from the railroad, of the odor of pine-shavings from the carpenter shops, of the pungent smell of leather from below, and of the fragrance from the stable across the street. Pete said it was healthful and satisfying. None disputed the latter quality. Pete’s rooms--there were two of them--were quite as unique as his surroundings.

Picture a bare, plank-ceiled loft, some forty feet long by twenty feet broad, divided in the exact center by a partition of half-inch matched boards and lighted by five windows. Imagine the walls and ceiling painted a pea-green, mentally hang two big oil-lamps--one in the middle of each room--from the latter, and spread half a dozen skins--bear, coyote, antelope, and cougar--over the discolored floor, and you have Pete’s apartments. There was a door in the partition, but as it wouldn’t close, owing to inequalities in the casing, it was always open.

The furniture, of which there was very little, represented Centerport’s best: there was a “golden-oak” bureau, a “Flemish-oak” easy chair, a “Chippendale” card-table--I am employing the dealer’s language--an iron bedstead, a “mahogany” study table, a sprinkling of brightly upholstered, straight-backed chairs, and a few other pieces, equally highly polished and equally disturbing to the esthetic eye.

The walls were almost, but not quite, bare. Pete didn’t care for pictures, but on nails driven at haphazard hung a silver-mounted bridle, a rawhide lariat, a villainous-looking pair of Mexican wheel-spurs, a leather-banded sombrero, a cartridge-belt and holster, the latter holding a revolver, a leather quirt, and an Indian war-drum, while over the bedstead in the back room the head of a grizzly bear perpetually resented intrusion with snarling lips. The head of a mountain-sheep held a place of honor in the other apartment, and underneath it hung a Navajo Indian blanket, almost worth its weight in gold.

There were only two objects that might have been set down in an inventory as pictures: one was an advertising calendar and the other a photograph of Pete’s mother, who had died soon after Pete’s advent in the world. The photograph shared the top of the dazzling yellow bureau with Pete’s brushes and shaving utensils.

In a corner of the front room was a trunk, covered with a yellow and red saddle-blanket. Against it leaned two guns--a battered Winchester carbine and a handsome two-barreled 12-gauge shot-gun. In another corner, as though thrown there the moment before, lay a brown leather stock saddle, with big hooded stirrups. The card-table held Pete’s smoking things--two corn-cob pipes, a small sack of granulated tobacco, and an ash-tray. The tobacco usually distributed itself over the table and the ashes always blew onto the floor.

In bright weather, the sunlight streamed in through three of the five windows and crossed the rooms in golden shafts, wherein the dust atoms danced and swirled. With the sunlight came the sounds of the neighborhood--the clang of the blacksmith’s sledge against the anvil, the screech of the carpenter’s plane, the steady _tap_, _tap_, _tap_ of the harness-maker’s hammer, the stamping of horses’ hoofs, the clamor of passing trains, and the chatter of the loiterers below the windows. Pete called the front room the “corral,” the rear room the “stable,” the whole the “Ranch.”

If I have risked tiring the reader with too long a description of Pete’s dwelling-place, it is because, in spite of their strange furnishings and hideous green walls, the rooms were far more homelike than many a smart suite in Grace Hall, and, to quote Tommy again, were “Pete through and through.” Further, while Allan’s, Hal’s, and Tommy’s rooms sometimes served as meeting-places for the four, the chambers over the harness-shop were their favorite resort. There was an undeniable charm about them; and if you could prevail upon Pete to close a few of the windows in cold weather, and if you didn’t mind sitting upon the tables and the trunk, you could be very comfy at the Ranch.