Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/82

62 I am here for, too. It is all for Yale, isn't it?"

The two in the pair-oar rowed across the river, landed a half mile above the start of the four-mile course, and walked down the railroad track.

"We can't do anything more than catch their time over the first mile," observed the experienced Bates; "but that will give us a good line on the gait they are going." Hastings meekly followed instructions to hurry to the hill opposite the first-mile flag, and be ready to wave his handkerchief when the Harvard crew should pass him. Bates, at the start with a stop watch, would snap the time at this signal. In dust and quivering heat, Hastings trudged along the ties, crept up the hill and lay on his stomach under a tree, waiting the appearance of the Harvard crew. The tears could not be held back at thought of this humiliation, of the abysmal gap between this petty spying in ambush, and all the days in which he had swung by this first-mile flag in the University eight.

There was much time for meditation,