Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (31 page)

“How mean!” Betsy whispered indignantly to Tacy.

“He had it coming,” said Hazel Smith, wiping her eyes.

“I think it was terrible,” said Tacy. She and Betsy were not only suffering for Maddox but also for Tib, and as soon as the meeting broke up they rushed to find her.

But Tib was rushing away.

“Where are you going?”

“To catch Ralph. He's got to get out and play at that St. John game. He'll never live this down if he doesn't.” There were round red circles on Tib's cheeks. “I'm going to talk to him,” she declared. “I'm going to say, ‘If you don't win this game, my fine curly-headed friend, I won't go with you any more! Not ever again.'”

“But he can't possibly win it,” said Betsy. “St. John has an undefeated team.”

“He has to,” said Tib, and started running again.

M
ISS
B
ANGETER'S REQUEST
for a loyal attendance at the St. John game was heeded far beyond her expectations. The depot platform, next morning, was crowded with boys and girls. It was a cold day with a driving north wind. The seniors had abandoned their gray and violet caps. Boys wore heavy woolen caps with ear muffs. Girls wore stocking caps, or tarns, or hats tied down with automobile veils. All wore neck scarfs, galoshes, woolen mittens, heavy winter coats.

Maroon and gold rosettes, or maroon and gold bows with long flying ends, graced every coat. There were dozens of Deep Valley banners, a few horns. But in spite of these brave trappings, hopes were low. The team huddled about Stewie, down at the end of the platform. Joe, as a
Sun
reporter, stayed with the team. Maddox stood close to the coach, speaking to no one. There were bitter creases on either side of his beautiful, unblemished mouth.

Rooters asked one another how yesterday's joke had affected Maddox. Most people thought it was deserved, but some considered it ill-advised. It might have made him so mad that he would throw the game.

“I doubt that,” said Alice mildly.

“It must have taken all the heart out of him, though,” Betsy insisted, and Tacy agreed. Tib didn't speak. She still looked grim.

On the train, spirits lifted a little. The car was warm; no one minded smoke or cinders. Rooters ate Cracker Jack and drank at the water cooler. Lolling in the red plush seats, they practised cheers. Someone had brought a banjo and Winona started a song. Only the team remained gloomy, still huddled around Stewie at one end of the car. Maddox's mouth was still enclosed by bitter parentheses, and he kept his gaze fixed on the window.

Betsy, too, looked out of the window as the train sped along beside the river. Muskrats had built houses at the water's edge. Willows touched the pale landscape with yellow.

She stole these glances guiltily, aware that she should be thinking only of the game. She knew that her interest in football would always be pretended, not real and burning, like Joe's or Winona's. She wanted to win, and she liked the excitement, but she liked the flying landscape more.

St. John was only the second station up the line. Shortly the train was running past small houses and snow-covered gardens. The brakeman looked into the car to bawl, “St. John the next stop!” and with a shriek of brakes, the train jerked to a halt.

As the crowd spilled out of the train, Tacy took Betsy's arm and Tib's. “Just think how often we've planned about traveling together, and now we're doing it!” she said.

Everyone thought it was exciting to be in another town. They walked up and down the Main Street which was so like and yet so unlike Deep Valley's Front Street. There were the same rows of store fronts; banks, big and impressive on the corners; a hotel and the brand new Motion Picture Palace, and a livery stable down the street. The kinds of stores and shops were just the same, but there
wasn't a familiar name or face until Winona caught sight of a cousin.

“Poor old St. John! Poor old St. John!” she began to chant.

“You've got your nerve!” he said. “St. John hasn't lost a game this year and your team isn't worth peanuts.”

The Crowd roared defiance, “Poor old St. John! Poor old St. John!” The cousin laughed and turned away, and the Crowd went into a bakery and bought cakes and cookies, cream puffs and jelly roll to take out to the field.

This was swept by a biting wind filled with small sharp flakes. The ground was frozen and looked cruel. Betsy saw Joe moving efficiently about, bareheaded, copy paper handy as usual, his windblown face set.

She ran over to him. “How's Maddox?”

“He doesn't talk. I guess it cut him pretty deep.”

“Tib lectured him, too.”

“Well,” said Joe, “he had it coming, but I can't help feeling sorry for the guy.”

The St. John players looked very big and confident. The Deep Valley players looked unhappy and cold. While the teams warmed up, the Deep Valley rooters cheered, but the cheering was half-hearted.

Deep Valley kicked off, and the St. John receiver
jockeyed from his own ten to his own forty-five yard line before Dennie brought him down. Deep Valley cheered again, but still half-heartedly.

“Thirty-five yards on the kick-off!” Winona groaned. “The final score will be a million to nothing.”

On the next play, St. John drove through tackle, made only a couple of yards. On the next, trying left end, St. John got exactly a foot. Then St. John was stopped in its tracks.

And now, Deep Valley's cheers had a new note—a spontaneous, excited note. Not because, with the fourth down coming up, St. John must kick. Not because St. John, that invincible, that unstoppable eleven, had been held. But because one Deep Valley player had been in on all three plays, had jammed ruggedly into each St. John ball carrier, hauling him up short as much as to say, “Where do you think you're going, Bub?” And that player was Maddox.

“Maddox! Maddox! Maddox! Maddox!” The frenzied repetition lifted into the cold air, rolled across the frozen field, and Maddox waved a hand as though to signal, “Wait till you see what comes next!” Nor did he try to conceal the fact that his lovely underlip, unmarred through all the season, was now as fat as a slab of liver from rude contact
with some St. John knee, or hip or shoulder, or maybe even knuckles.

Betsy, quick with a quotation which would have delighted Miss Bangeter, flung exultant arms about Tib, “Richard is himself again!” And Tib, hugging Betsy in return, shrieked “An eye for an eye!” and thought that she, too, was quoting Shakespeare.

Well, if it wasn't an eye for an eye, it was almost exactly Richard, himself, again. Led by a brand new, or perhaps the original, Maddox, as opposed to the one previously on display, Deep Valley did what no other team had been able to do all season. It held St. John's giants, that irresistible force, to one touchdown and a field goal in the first half.

The score, according to the point system used in those days, was 8 to 0.

During the intermission, Deep Valley rooters made the gray sky ring. They talked feverishly, rushed to get information.

“What's happened?” Betsy asked Joe. “What's got into Maddox?”

He beamed into her face, although she felt sure he hardly saw her.

“Plenty!” he cried. “Plenty!”

She couldn't keep him by her side. He would pause for a moment and then he was gone, shouting, cheering, groaning.

Lloyd returned from a visit to the team.

“That lip of Ralph's is bad.”

“What's he going to do? Go out of the game?”

“Not a bit of it,” he answered, as though the question were absurd. “You couldn't get Maddox out of this game with a corkscrew.”

The second half began in an atmosphere of tingling excitement. But in spite of Deep Valley's furious resistance, St. John made another touchdown. They kicked goal and the score stood 14 to 0. Despite furious struggle it was still 14 to 0, with ten minutes of the final half to play.

Oddly enough, Deep Valley wasn't discouraged. It had expected to lose, and it found consolation in the magnificent, unbelievable performance of Maddox. He hadn't stopped St. John. But no one could stop St. John. Defeat was inevitable. Therefore, the sensible course was to find joy in Maddox and let the score go Gallagher.

And Maddox was magnificent! No longer was he protecting his profile. He thought nothing today of his ravishing nose. He did not care a hang for his beautiful mouth, his beguiling eyes. The profile was a smear, part red, part mud. The nose was a blob. His mouth had been banged, swatted, slugged, and probably jumped on until it was less mouth than pucker. His left eye was closed tighter than a drum.

But the right eye of Maddox, the once-again great Maddox, was wide open and full of fire and fight. With the score 14 to 0 and ten minutes to play, it surveyed the battle field with heroic confidence.

St. John had just scored its second touchdown, and Deep Valley was waiting for the kickoff. Close to his own goal line, Maddox balanced lightly, and his voice charged through his fellow players like an electric shock.

“Come on, guys! Three touchdowns in ten minutes. Don't tell me we can't do it!”

St. John kicked and Maddox received. And he ran. He ran like a veteran fox. He sliced left from the fifteen-yard line until he was almost out of bounds but twenty yards forward. Thereafter nobody, not even the watchful Joe, could have told how he went. But everybody knew that in a riot of cheers from Deep Valley and groans from St. John he went this way and that, stiff-arming half a dozen tacklers for a touchdown. A moment later he kicked goal.

Deep Valley called time out. The smear on Maddox's face was more crimson than ever. Somewhere in his eighty-five-yard run Maddox had hit something with his face. Something almost beyond belief had happened to that underlip. Stewie trotted onto
the field and Joe ran after him. The crowd watched the conference, saw Dennie swing a fond hand across Maddox's muddy shoulder.

Joe came back for a breathless moment later to report the conversation.

“Better come out, son,” Stewie had said.

Maddox had laughed. If there was a touch of histrionics in the laugh he was entitled to it.

“Tape me up,” he said. “I'll hold together. But,” he added, grinning at Dennie, “don't bother to bring any comb.”

That was when Dennie had hugged him.

Dennie kicked off. It was a beautiful kick, high and deep into a corner. A St. John player took it on the four-yard line, ran into destruction, and the ball exploded out of his arms and bobbled sidewise, free and more inviting than a star sapphire.

It was Maddox who had made the tackle, and it was Maddox, scrambling like a frog, who recovered the fumble. It was Maddox who carried the ball on the next play, with head lowered, like a frantic bull, to plough over for a second touchdown. This time he missed the kick and the score stood St. John 14, Deep Valley 11.

Once again he refused to go out of the game when Stewie came trotting onto the field to worry over that lip.

“How much more time have we got?” Maddox asked (and Joe repeated).

“Six minutes.”

“I can do it,” Maddox said, and although earlier that season the whole team would have resented the first person singular, now everyone conceded his right to it.

“He said it as calmly as he might have said, ‘Give me a malted milk,'” Joe reported, and the whole Deep Valley rooting section was sure he would make another touchdown.

But not calmly sure. The Deep Valley rooting section now was made up entirely of maniacs. These banged one another on the head, beat one another on the shoulders, stamped, waved arms and blankets, even tossed overshoes in the air, although any rooter with any sense must have realized that in a little while overshoeless feet would turn to five-toed icicles.

“Maddox! Maddox! Maddox!” The urgent yell—mingled treble and bass—soared up and up.

Deep Valley kicked off again. This time Dennie did less well. A St. John player took the kick behind nice interference on the twenty-yard line and moved to the thirty. And on three plays, the big, bold St. John backfield, aided by the big, bold St. John line, moved twelve yards more. On the next three plays,
the same combination made a second first down. On the next three, a third, then a fourth.

Now with the ball on Deep Valley's twenty-two, St. John struck again, off tackle; but this time Deep Valley gave only a yard. Rather, Maddox gave. He was in on the runner like a heavy, tired battering ram. Nor did St. John gain much on the next play or the next; only a yard each time. So it was Deep Valley's ball, on Deep Valley's nineteen-yard line. It was eighty-one yards to go for a touchdown. And once again Maddox asked his same question.

“How much time?”

“Four minutes.”

Joe came back with the story.

“I can't run with the ball any more,” Maddox said. “Not a long run. My legs are giving out. But look! We'll do it this way. Listen!”

They listened, and agreed, and to the confusion of St. John's followers and the delight of the Deep Valley rooters, hoarse now, but still able to rasp out some sort of roar, they did it Maddox's way.

Maddox smashed six yards through center, his lip crimson, bare of tape because he would not stop to patch it. Stan made three off tackle, because St. John was set to stop not him, but Maddox. Dennie made a first down, loping wide around left end for
the same reason. That brought Deep Valley to its own thirty-five-yard line.

Maddox smashed through center, and lost his helmet but would not bother to pick it up. Dave, long, light, and swift, duplicated Dennie's earlier lope. It was first down again on Deep Valley's forty-seven. And so, with Maddox smashing just often enough to make St. John watch him, while Stan, Dennie, or Dave loped the needed distance, Deep Valley got to St. John's forty-yard line, to the twenty-five, and the twelve, and finally the two.

Off on the side line, Betsy and Tacy were screaming, but Tib was standing as stiffly silent as a triumphant little blond school teacher who had succeeded in larruping her class's biggest boy. Joe was watching coolly on the flank, his penciled notes accurate and precise, but his eyes flashing. And all around, Deep Valley rooters even in advance of victory were taunting the sons and daughters of St. John, dejected now even in advance of defeat.

There was a pause, and once more Joe brought back the story.

“You take it over, Ralph,” said Stan.

“That's right,” said Dave. “You take it, Ralph. We'll open a hole.” And the breathless line, gathered around, echoed him. “We'll open a hole.”

Maddox looked at them with affection, but his
smeared face, with its incredible lip, set decisively.

“Nope,” he said. “I'll open the hole, with some help from the rest of you. Dennie will go for the touchdown.”