There were no speed records in those days. Wouldn"t have made any difference if there were. Harris just turned on all the juice his old double-opposed motor could soak up, and when we hit the wooden crossings on the outskirts of town we fellows in the tonneau went up so high that we changed sides coming down. It wasn"t over twenty minutes till we sighted a little cloud of dust just beyond a little town to the north.
Pretty soon we saw it was Ole. He was still doing his six miles per. We caught up and Bost hopped out, still mad.
"Where in Billy-be-blamed are you going, you human trolley car?" he spluttered, sprinting along beside Skja.r.s.en. "What do you mean by breaking up a game in the middle and vamoosing with the ball? Do you think we"re going to win this game on mileage? Turn around, you chump, and climb into this car."
Ole looked around him sadly. He kept on running as he did. "Aye ent care to stop," he said. "Aye kent suit you, Master Bost. You tal me Aye skoll du a teng, den you cuss me for duing et. You tal me not to du a teng and you cuss me some more den. Aye tenk I yust keep on a-running, lak yu tal me tu last night. Et ent so hard bein" cussed ven yu ban running."
"I tell you to stop, you potato-top," gasped Bost. By this time he was fifteen yards behind and losing at every step. He had wasted too much breath on oratory. We picked him up in the car and set him alongside of Ole again.
"See here, Ole, I"m tired of this," he said, sprinting up by him again.
"The game"s waiting. Come on back. You"re making a fool of yourself."
"Eny teng Aye du Aye ban beeg fule," said Ole gloomily. "Aye yust keep on runnin". Fallers ent got breath to call me fule ven Aye run. Aye tenk das best vay."
We picked Bost up again thirty yards behind. Maybe he would have run better if he hadn"t choked so in his conversation. In another minute we landed him abreast of Ole again. He got out and sprinted for the third time. He wabbled as he did it.
"Ole," he panted, "I"ve been mistaken in you. You are all right, Ole. I never saw a more intelligent fellow. I won"t cuss you any more, Ole. If you"ll stop now we"ll take you back in an automobile--hold on there a minute; can"t you see I"m all out of breath?"
"Aye ban gude faller, den?" asked Ole, letting out another link of speed.
"You are a"--puff-puff--"peach, Ole," gasped Bost.
"I"ll"--puff-puff--"never cuss you again. Please"--puff-puff--"stop!
Oh, hang it, I"m all in." And Bost sat down in the road.
A hundred yards on we noticed Ole slacken speed. "It"s sinking through his skull," said Harris eagerly. In another minute he had stopped. We picked up Bost again and ran up to him. He surveyed us long and critically.
"Das ban qveer masheen," he said finally. "Aye tenk Aye lak Aye skoll be riding back in it. Aye ent care for das futball game, Aye ga.s.s. It ban tu much running in it."
We took Ole back to town in twenty-two minutes, three chickens, a dog and a back spring. It was close to five o"clock when he ran out on the field again. The Muggledorfer team was still waiting. Time was no object to them. They would only play ten minutes, but in that ten minutes Ole made three scores. Five subst.i.tutes stood back of either goal and asked him with great politeness to stop as he tore over the line. And he did it. If any one else had run six miles between halves he would have stopped a good deal short of the line. But as far as we could see, it hadn"t winded Ole.
Bost went home by himself that night after the game, not stopping even to a.s.sure us that as a team we were beneath his contempt. The next afternoon he was, if anything, a little more vitriolic than ever--but not with Ole. Toward the middle of the signal practice he pulled himself together and touched Ole gently.
[Ill.u.s.tration: He pulled himself together and touched Ole gently _Page 26_]
"My dear Mr. Skja.r.s.en," he said apologetically, "if it will not annoy you too much, would you mind running the same way the rest of the team does? I don"t insist on it, mind you, but it looks so much better to the audience, you know."
"Jas," said Ole; "Aye ban fule, Aye ga.s.s, but yu ban tu polite to say it."
CHAPTER II
INITIATING OLE
Were you ever Hamburgered by a real, live college fraternity? I mean, were you ever initiated into full brotherhood by a Greek-letter society with the aid of a baseball bat, a sausage-making machine, a stick of dynamite and a corn-sh.e.l.ler? What"s that? You say you belong to the Up-to-Date Wood-choppers and have taken the josh degree in the n.o.ble Order of p.r.o.ng-Horned Wapiti? Forget it. Those aren"t initiations. They are rest cures. I went into one of those societies which give horse-play initiations for middle-aged daredevils last year and was bored to death because I forgot to bring my knitting. They are stiff enough for fat business men who never do anything more exciting than to fall over the lawn mower in the cellar once a year; but, compared with a genuine, eighteen-donkey-power college frat initiation with a Spanish Inquisition attachment, the little degree teams, made up of grandfathers, feel like a slap on the wrist delivered by a young lady in frail health.
Mind you, I"m not talking about the baby-ribbon affairs that the college boys use nowadays. It doesn"t seem to be the fashion to grease the landscape with freshmen any more. Initiations are getting to be as safe and sane as an ice-cream festival in a village church. When a frat wants to submit a neophyte to a trying ordeal it sends him out on the campus to climb a tree, or makes him go to a dance in evening clothes with a red necktie on. A boy who can roll a peanut half a mile with a toothpick, or can fish all morning in a pail of water in front of the college chapel without getting mad and trying to thrash any one is considered to be lion-hearted enough to ornament any frat. These are mollycoddle times in all departments. I"m glad I"m out of college and am catching street cars in the rush hours. That is about the only job left that feels like the good old times in college when muscles were made to jar some one else with.
Eight or ten years ago, when a college fraternity absorbed a freshman, the job was worth talking about. There was no half-way business about it. The freshman could tell at any stage of the game that something was being done to him. They just ate him alive, that was all. Why, at Siwash, where I was lap-welded into the Eta Bita Pies, any fraternity which initiated a candidate and left enough of him to appear in chapel the next morning was the joke of the school. Even the girls"
fraternities gave it the laugh. The girls used to do a little quiet initiating themselves, and when they received a sister into membership you could generally follow her mad career over the town by a trail of hairpins, "rats" and little fragments of dressgoods.
Those were the days when the pledgling of a good high-pressure frat wrote to his mother the night before he was taken in and telegraphed her when he found himself alive in the morning. There used to be considerable rivalry between the frats at Siwash in the matter of giving a freshman a good, hospitable time. I remember when the Sigh Whoopsilons hung young Allen from the girder of an overhead railroad crossing, and let the switch engines smoke him up for two hours as they pa.s.sed underneath, there was a good deal of jealousy among the rest of us who hadn"t thought of it. The Alfalfa Delts went them one better by tying roller skates to the shoulders and hips of a big freshman football star and hauling him through the main streets of Jonesville on his back, behind an automobile, and the Chi Yi"s covered a candidate with plaster of Paris, with blow-holes for his nose, sculptured him artistically, and left him before the college chapel on a pedestal all night. The Delta Kappa Sonof.a.guns set fire to their house once by shooting Roman candles at a row of neophytes in the cellar, and we had to turn out at one A. M.
one winter morning to help the Delta Flushes dig a freshman out of their chimney. They had been trying to let him down into the fireplace, and when he got stuck they had poked at him with a clothes pole until they had mussed him up considerably. This just shows you what a gay life the young scholar led in the days when every ritual had claws on, and there was no such thing as soothing syrup in the equipment of a college.
Of all the frats at Siwash the Eta Bita Pies, when I was in college, were preeminent in the art of near-killing freshmen. We used to call our initiation "A little journey to the pearly gates," and once or twice it looked for a short time as if the victim had mislaid his return ticket.
Treat yourself to an election riot, a railway collision and a subway explosion, all in one evening, and you will get a rather sketchy idea of what we aimed at. I don"t mean, of course, that we ever killed any one.
There is no real danger in an initiation, you know, if the initiate does exactly as he is told and the members don"t get careless and something that wasn"t expected doesn"t happen--as did when we tied Tudor Snyder to the south track while an express went by on the north track, and then had the time of our young lives getting him off ahead of a wild freight which we hadn"t counted on. All we ever aimed at was to make the initiate so thankful to get through alive that he would love Eta Bita Pie forever, and I must say we usually succeeded. It is wonderful what a young fellow will endure cheerfully for the sake of pa.s.sing it on to some one else the next year. I remember I was pretty mad when my Eta Bita Pie brethren headed me up in a barrel and rolled me downhill into a creek without taking the trouble to remove all the nails. It seemed like wanton carelessness. But long before my nose was out of splints and my hide would hold water I was perfecting our famous "Lover"s Leap" for the next year"s bunch. That was our greatest triumph. There was an abandoned rock quarry north of town with thirty feet of water in the bottom and a fifty-foot drop to the water. By means of a long beam and a system of pulleys we could make a freshman walk the plank and drop off into the water in almost perfect safety, providing the ropes didn"t break. It created a sensation, and the other frats were mad with jealousy. We took every man we wanted the next fall before the authorities put a stop to the scheme. That shows you just how repugnant the idea of being initiated is to the green young collegian.
Of course, fraternity initiations are supposed to be conducted for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the chapter and not of the candidate. But you can"t always entirely tell what will happen, especially if the victim is husky and unimpressionable. Sometimes he does a little initiating himself. And that reminds me that I started out to tell a story and not to give a lecture on the polite art of making veal salad. Did I ever tell you of the time when we initiated Ole Skja.r.s.en into Eta Bita Pie, and how the ceremony backfired and very nearly blew us all into the discard? No?
Well, don"t get impatient and look in the back of the book. I"ll tell it now and cut as many corners as I can.
[Ill.u.s.tration: There wasn"t a college anywhere around us that didn"t have Ole"s hoofmarks all over its pride _Page 33_]
As I have told you before, Ole Skja.r.s.en was a little slow in grasping the real beauties of football science. It took him some time to uncoil his mind from the principles of woodchopping and concentrate it on the full duty of man in a fullback"s position. He nearly drove us to a sanitarium during the process, but when he once took hold, mercy me, how he did progress from hither to yon over the opposition! He was the wonder fullback of those times, and at the end of three years there wasn"t a college anywhere that didn"t have Ole"s hoofmarks all over its pride. Oh, he was a darling. To see him jumping sideways down a football field with the ball under his arm, landing on some one of the opposition at every jump and romping over the goal line with tacklers hanging to him like streamers would have made you want to vote for him for Governor. Ole was the greatest man who ever came to Siwash. Prexy had always been considered some personage by the outside world, but he was only a b.u.mp in the background when Ole was around.
Of course we all loved Ole madly, but for all that he didn"t make a frat. He didn"t, for the same reason that a rhinoceros doesn"t get invited to garden parties. He didn"t seem to fit the part. Not only his clothes, but also his haircuts were hand-me-down. He regarded a fork as a curiosity. His language was a sort of a head-on collision between Norwegian and English in which very few words had come out undamaged. In social conversation he was out of bounds nine minutes out of ten, and it kept three men busy changing the subject when he was in full swing. He could dodge eleven men and a referee on the football field without trying, but put him in a forty by fifty room with one vase in it, and he couldn"t dodge it to save his life.
No, he just naturally didn"t fit the part, and up to his senior year no fraternity had bid him. This grieved Ole so that he retired from football just before the Kiowa game on which all our young hearts were set, and before he would consent to go back and leave some more of his priceless foot-tracks on the opposition we had to pledge him to three of our proudest fraternities. Talk of wedding a favorite daughter to the greasy villain in the melodrama in order to save the homestead! No crushed father, with a mortgage hanging over him in the third act, could have felt one-half so badly as we Eta Bita Pies did when we had pledged Ole and realized that all the rest of the year we would have to climb over him in our beautiful, beamed-ceiling lounging-room and parade him before the world as a much-loved brother.
But the job had to be done, and all three frats took a melancholy pleasure in arranging the details of the initiation. We decided to make it a three-night demonstration of all that the Siwash frats had learned in the art of imitating dynamite and other disintegrants. The Alfalfa Delts were to get first crack at him. They were to be followed on the second night by the Chi Yi Sighs, who were to make him a brother, dead or alive. On the third night we of Eta Bita Pie were to take the remains and decorate them with our fraternity pin after ceremonies in which being kicked by a mule would only be considered a two-minute recess.
We fellows knew that when it came to initiating Ole we would have to do the real work. The other frats couldn"t touch it. They might scratch him up a bit, but they lacked the ingenuity, the enthusiasm--I might say the poetic temperament--to make a good job of it. We determined to put on an initiation which would make our past efforts seem like the effort of an old ladies" home to start a rough-house. It was a great pleasure, I a.s.sure you, to plan that initiation. We revised our floor work and added some cellar and garret and ceiling and second-story work to it. We began the program with the celebrated third degree and worked gradually from that up to the twenty-third degree, with a few intervals of simple a.s.sault and battery for breathing spells. When we had finished doping out the program we shook hands all around. It was a masterpiece. It would have made Battenberg lace out of a steam boiler.
Ole was initiated into the Alfalfa Delts on a Wednesday night. We heard echoes of it from our front porch. The next morning only three of the Alfalfa Delts appeared at chapel, while Ole was out at six A. M., roaming about the campus with the Alfalfa Delt pin on his necktie. The next night the Chi Yi Sighs took him on for one hundred and seventeen rounds in their brand new lodge, which had a sheet-iron initiation den.
The whole thing was a fizzle. When we looked Ole over the next morning we couldn"t find so much as a scratch on him. He was wearing the Chi Yi pin beside the Alfalfa Delt pin, and he was as happy as a baby with a bottle of ink. There were nine broken window-lights in the Chi Yi lodge, and we heard in a roundabout way that they called in the police about three A. M. to help them explain to Ole that the initiation was over.
That"s the kind of a trembling neophyte Ole was. But we just giggled to ourselves. Anybody could break up a Chi Yi initiation, and the Alfalfa Delts were a set of narrow-chested sn.o.bs with automobile callouses instead of muscles. We ate a hasty dinner on Friday evening and set all the scenery for the big scrunch. Then we put on our old clothes and waited for Ole to walk into our parlor.
He wasn"t due until nine, but about eight o"clock he came creaking up the steps and dented the door with his large knuckles in a bashful way.
He looked larger and k.n.o.bbier than ever and, if anything, more embarra.s.sed. We led him into the lounging-room in silence, and he sat down twirling his straw hat. It was October, and he had worn the thing ever since school opened. Other people who wore straw hats in October get removed from under them more or less violently; but, somehow, no one had felt called upon to maltreat Ole. We hated that hat, however, and decided to begin the evening"s work on it.
"Your hat, Mr. Skja.r.s.en," said Bugs Wilbur in majestic tones.
Ole reached the old ruin out. Wilbur took it and tossed it into the grate. Ole upset four or five of us who couldn"t get out of the way and rescued the hat, which was blazing merrily.
"Ent yu gat no sanse?" he roared angrily. "Das ban a gude hat." He looked at it gloomily. "Et ban spoiled now," he growled, tossing the remains into a waste-paper basket. "Yu ban purty fallers. Vat for yu do dat?"
The basket was full of papers and things. In about four seconds it was all ablaze. Wilbur tried to go over and choke it off, but Ole pushed him back with one forefinger.
"Yust stay avay," he growled. "Das basket ent costing some more as my hat, I ga.s.s."
We stood around and watched the basket burn. We also watched a curtain blaze up and the finish on a nice mahogany desk crack and blister. It was all very humorous. The fire kindly went out of its own accord, and some one tiptoed around and opened the windows in a timid sort of way.
It was a very successful initiation so far--only we were the neophytes.
"This won"t do," muttered "Allie" Bangs, our president. He got up and went over to Ole. "Mr. Skja.r.s.en," he said severely, "you are here to be initiated into the awful mysteries of Eta Bita Pie. It is not fitting that you should enter her sacred boundaries in an unfettered condition.
Submit to the brethren, that they may blindfold you and bind you for the ordeals to come." Gee, but we used to use hand-picked language when we were unsheathing our claws!
Ole growled. "Ol rite," he said. "But Aye tal yu ef yu fallers burn das har west lak yu burn ma hat I skoll raise ruffhaus like deekins!"