Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/72

52 Stung to the soul by the taunt of the coach, he threw his splendid shoulders against the twelve-foot sweep, striving always to be a little ahead of Number Six, whose instant of catch was signaled by the tell-tale tightening of the crease in the back of his neck. The Captain called:

"Give her ten good ones, and look out for the stroke. It's going up."

"O-n-e, T-w-o, Thr-e-e, F-o-u-r, F-i-v-e," gasped the eight, in husky chorus to the cadence of the catch.

"Slo-w down on your y-o-u-r slides," yelled the bobbing coxswain. "You're be-h-i-n-d, Number Five." Hastings could have throttled the coxswain for this. He had heard it so often that it cut him on the raw. The Head Coach picked up the damnable refrain:

"You are behind, Number Five."

Recalling how once, to fill an idle half hour, he had enumerated sixty-four faults possible in rowing a single stroke, Hastings was sure that in this spurt he was committing all these and several as yet unrecorded. The futility of his flurried