Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/246

 linesman rolling past them towards the Gym. door.

"Where'd I raise him? Stole him from the U. of P. Father's something or other up in the coal-fields—oodles of money. Son was all set up to go to Pennsy, but we got him down here and led him up and down the Great White Way a couple of nights. Nobody could coax him away now—unless there's a University at Paris."

McAlpine stared after die powerful back and shoulders filling the doorway. "God, what a brute! Baby hippo walking on his hind legs. What's his breed anyway?"

"Some sort of hunky. I'm not up on their stud book, but I'd say off-hand he's a cross between a Slovak cart-horse and a Ruthenian wild boar—lots of space in his garret, but you can't hurt him with a pick-ax."

"But, how in merry hell, are we going to keep him eligible? What courses did you get him entered for?"

"Oh, assorted snap courses—English Lit. mostly. And he has a tame tutor that lives with him and does the studying. How'd you suppose he ever got through High School?"

Neale left them talking and stepped into the Gym., admiring enviously the massive bone-structure of the new student of English Literature.

There were horribly emotional ups and downs in the Junior football season for Neale, ups and downs that ploughed and harrowed his young soul, planted many seeds in his heart, and left him at the end of the season with so much new knowledge of himself and others to digest, with experiences so rich and varied, dark and brilliant, to look back on, that he needed the entire rest of the year to grow up to them. The other students, those who did not play football, seemed to him like little boys, fooling around with marbles and kites, so little did they know of the black depths of depression and despair, and the hard-won heights of exultation which crammed his own personal life full, and gave him a premature maturity of experience, like that of a boy who has been through a war.