Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/67

Rh month. That's where the worst break in the swing comes. Did you hear the Old Man threaten to take him out of the boat and get him a job as a farm hand?"

The Culprit wearily picked himself up and dressed in a dark corner of the boat-house, shunning conversation. After the training-table supper, the Head Coach and his younger staff of graduate experts, who had flocked back to help stem the adverse tide, summoned the crew into the parlor of the lonely old farmhouse. The Nestor of Yale rowing, who for twenty years had taught Yale crews how to win, leaned against the battered piano and looked at the ruddy and wholesome young faces around him. It might have been a council about to weigh matters of life and death, so grave was the troubled aspect of the waiting group, so stern the set of their leader's bulldog jaw.

To-night he had something of their nervous uncertainty, and it showed in the way his strong fingers played with the fringe of the faded piano cover. Picking up the well-worn logbook in which was recorded year by year the daily work of