Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/66

46 Now, with the Harvard race less than a week away, the daily toil was a nightmare of ineffective striving. The pulsating shell hesitated between strokes, it rolled without visible cause, and seemed sentiently to realize that the crew was rowing as eight men, not as one.

The boat circled wide and the men swept it listlessly toward the lights of the Quarters at Gales Ferry. They had just undergone the severest ordeal in all athletic training in their race against the stop watch, yet if the work had been good they would have finished vibrant as steel springs, spurting in this welcome home stretch like the sweep of a hawk. Squatted on the boathouse float a little later, dousing pails of water over his sweating shoulders, Hastings heard the Stroke growl to Number Seven:

"What's the matter with you loafers back there?"

"I'm not behind," retorted Seven, with hair-trigger irritability. "The trouble is in the middle of the boat. Hastings is too heavy to row in form this year, and he seems to have gone to pieces in the last