“There’s been a black giant around here,” Johnny said. “I’m sure of that. Could he have been the same man?”
“Oh, no! God forbid!” the girl laughed uncertainly. “That was our servant. We brought him from Africa. He—why, come to think of it, there is a resemblance. But he—Oh my! No. He’s not the man!
“You see,” she explained as Johnny gave her a questioning look, “we set Hassie, that’s our servant, to hunt up your friend, Panther Eye. He did a good piece of work—almost. In the end though, he allowed him to slip away.”
“He would have had a hard time stopping him,” Johnny chuckled. “Even if he’d known everything, he would have vanished.
“You see,” he leaned forward, “Panther Eye just wanted to take you back so you would be in that picture again, the broad, green pasture, the cows, the banana field, and all that. When you were back he was satisfied. He isn’t romantic, not in the least. And as for money, he never appears to need it much. So—”
“So it’s not much use looking.” The girlish figure drooped. “I—I did so want to thank him!”
“You might leave your address.” Johnny suggested.
“Yes. Yes. So I might. Will you loan me pencil and paper?”
As Johnny stood close to the girl while she wrote down the address, he became conscious of two things—that she was no ghost but a real person, and that she was really quite charming.
“And you,” she favored him with a rare smile, “you will come and see us?”
“Well—yes, perhaps.”
She held out her hand. Johnny took it in his own. It was a good firm hand. Johnny liked the touch of it.
“I said I would,” he whispered, as she disappeared through the door. “But will I? I wonder?”
“Tomorrow,” he thought with a thrill one minute later, “tomorrow is the big day.” Already the mysterious girl and her giant escort were crowded from his mind. The team, the game, these filled his entire horizon.
One more recollection slipped into Johnny’s mind and out again before he fell asleep that night. A half hour after their landing at Hillcrest he had come upon Kentucky practicing football all by himself. He was dropping the ball and picking it up, bouncing it on the ground and catching it, retrieving it in every manner imaginable. One thing was strange, the ball was soaking wet and the field was dry.
“How’d your ball get wet?” he had asked.
“I soaked it,” Kentucky dropped it, then fell upon it.
“Why?” Johnny had asked in surprise.
“Well,” Kentucky had replied quite soberly, “the weather man predicts dampness for tomorrow. If it rains, somebody’s going to drop the ball. And I’ll be ready to pick it up.”
“He doesn’t miss much, that boy,” Johnny murmured to himself just before he fell asleep.
Never before had there been such excitement about a Hillcrest football game. By one o’clock in the afternoon, Hillcrest was deserted. Coaches, busses, trucks and private cars had been forced into service. All Hillcrest, professors, students, men, women, boys, and girls, everyone journeyed to Naperville where the game was to be played.
When the time for the kick-off came, they were all there. Old grads were there too, hundreds of them. One man had journeyed all the way from New York. Crimson banners and pennants fluttered in the breeze. The College band roared, boomed and blared then settled down to, “Hail to Hillcrest!” Ah, yes, it was to be one glorious occasion.
A fine misty rain was blowing in from the east. But what of that? Blankets, heavy coats, and ulsters defied the weather. As for the team, they were all pepped up for the battle. Weather meant nothing to them. Bumps, bruises, even cuts would mean nothing to them. Nothing short of a broken leg could stop them today.
Today was the day of days. Year after year they had gone down to defeat. Today? Today! Just wait and see.
One thought disturbed Dave Powers as he took his place. Old Kentucky was in his suit but his bright, new crimson jersey did not shine out from the field. Instead it was hidden beneath a heavy gray blanket. Kentucky was on the bench. There, shivering from the cold, excitement, and bitter disappointment, he awaited the kick-off.
“Your rib is about healed,” the doctor had said to him. “However, if you should go into the game, and be tackled and thrown hard, it might result in permanent injuries.”
Well, doctor’s orders were doctor’s orders, but to Kentucky, had it not been for his teammates, they would have meant nothing. What were a few broken bones to the loss of the year’s game of games? It was Dynamite who had said, “You stay out until I need you.”
“But promise me,” Kentucky pleaded, “if the battle goes against you and if you think I can help, promise you’ll let me in.”
“Help, kid?” Dynamite had exclaimed. “Of course you could help. You and I could lick that Naperville bunch all by our lonesomes. And will I holler if we are getting the worst of it? You better believe I will, son!”
All the same, as Dynamite went into the game it was with a wordless prayer that little Kentucky might not be needed.
From the very start it was a thrilling game. From the first, too, Dynamite was to recall the words of Kentucky’s passed on by Johnny: “Somebody’s going to drop the ball.”
Naperville led off with a great kick. Punch, who received the ball, was tackled almost at once, on the Hillcrest thirty-yard line. On two line plunges, Hillcrest picked up seven yards. Then, as Bud Tucker, who played in Kentucky’s place at half, came round the left end, he was hit hard and thrown. The ball leaped from his grasp and was recovered by a Naperville man.
“Ha! Ha! Big joke!” one of the opponents yelled. They had heard this from a defeated team. Now they evidently meant to use it against Hillcrest.
To have the ball in the opponent’s hands on one’s own thirty-seven-yard line at the start of a game is no joke. The hard-hitting Naperville steam roller crushed the Hillcrest line again and again. “First down and ten—” and scarcely a moment later once again, “First down and ten—” From the bleachers came a roar like the breaking of a wild sea:
“Hold that line! Hold that line! Hold that line!”
Kentucky sat like a mummy in his blanket, shuddering and mumbling to himself.
Then, when it seemed that a touchdown was inevitable, once again, “somebody dropped the ball.” This time it was little Artie Stark who recovered. Hillcrest’s ball on their own thirteen-yard line. A quick huddle, a sudden snapping of the ball, a ducking of the head by Punch Dickman, as if to run with it, then a leaping upward like the rise of a submarine, and a quick kick that, catching the opponents off their guard, sent the ball rolling, all unmolested to Naperville’s ten-yard line.
“Bravo! Bravo!” Shedding his blanket as a snake sheds its skin, Kentucky leaped into a wild Indian dance.
But wait! Again that relentless beating back. There came line buck after line buck that Hillcrest’s slender line could not withstand. And after that, with startling suddenness, forward passes. Naperville, too, had learned how to invade the air.
One pass was complete, then a second. As this last pass was caught by a Naperville end, Dynamite too far away to do more than watch, saw him go coursing straight down the field. The ball carrier was followed by his own left-half.
“Punch is there,” Dynamite congratulated himself. “He’ll spill him. And how!”
He had spoken too soon. Punch did spill the runner, spilled him plenty, but the instant before Punch struck him, the runner threw a lateral to the man who followed him. The lateral was good, Punch went down with the Naperville end. The trailing Naperville half went through for a touchdown and the Naperville rooters burst the head of their big bass drum from sheer joy.
As for Old Kentucky, he shuddered more violently than ever. “Here!” There was a sharp, girlish voice close at hand. It was Jensie. She was holding out a small jug filled with something piping hot. What was in the jug? Kentucky knew and Jensie too. What did it matter about the rest? He drank it all and shuddered no more.
The game went on. Reenforcements were sent in to the Hillcrest line. This stiffened up the game. For the rest of that quarter and all through the second quarter the teams took turns bucking lines, trying passes, and punting on the fourth down. Neither team made great gains. At the end of the half the score stood at 7-0 against Hillcrest.
“Dynamite,” the slim Kentucky boy whispered tensely as for a moment Dave took a place beside him on the bench, “you can’t let them beat us! You just can’t. All the old grads are here. They’re burning up for a victory. I heard one of them say there’ll be a training-table for the team next year if we win this game. A free training-table, Dynamite! Think what that’ll mean to the boys who have to work! Let me come in, Dynamite. Just let me!”
“They’d bust you in pieces,” Dynamite grumbled.
“They’ll never touch me,” Kentucky’s eyes shone with a strange light. “No one ever has except that once and that—that was sort of an accident, you might say.”
“They’d get you, Kentucky. Those boys are out for blood. They’d murder you and then Doc would have me up for getting you killed.”
Kentucky made no reply. For a full moment he sat there in silence. “All right, Dave,” he said at last. His voice was low and flat.
“This is terrible,” Dave thought to himself.
“Give us one more quarter,” he pleaded after a moment of silence. “If we don’t score in the third quarter, you’ll go in. I swear it.
“But one thing,” he added in a low tone, “you’ll swear on the Bible you won’t let them tackle you. You’ll throw the ball away—anything at all.”
“Swear it on a stack of Bibles,” Kentucky grinned happily.
Never had Dave worked, hoped, and prayed for a scoring punch as he did in that third quarter. Never did the team back him up with greater determination. Never had they attempted such dazzling plays.
“Eighty-six,” was the first order they received as they went into a huddle.
“Eighty-six coming up,” Artie Stark gasped.
The team lined up as usual, balanced formation. Punch Dickman dropped back as if for a punt. The ball was snapped to him. He held it for a period of seconds. Dynamite came sweeping in close behind the line of scrimmage. Punch shot a shovel pass to him. He dashed round right end for a gain of five yards. As he was about to be tackled he shot it to Rabbit Jones. In the meantime Punch had followed Dynamite around right end. As Rabbit saw the end of his own eight-yard break for liberty, he lateralled it back to Punch and Punch went forward for a clean twenty yards.
“Yea! Yea! Yea!” came from the bleachers. “Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown!”
“Ninety-three,” Dynamite whispered. They were in a huddle and out again. They snapped into position, five men behind the line, three a yard back of the line, and two others one yard farther back. Punch received the ball. Artie Stark touched the ground. He was behind the line but this made him a technical lineman. Bud Talliver, a quarter who was also temporarily quartered behind the line, took a short pass from Punch to shoot around left end for a gain of twelve yards and one more first down.
“Repeat,” Dynamite whispered in the next huddle. There was a growing note of confidence in his tone.
They did repeat and at once met with disaster. The right guard of the enemy smelled the play. Somehow he broke through to throw Bud so hard that the ball bounced out of his hands and was lost to the enemy.
“No good!” Dynamite muttered. “But we gotta’ score! We just gotta’ score!”
There are some things in this life that “just must” be done but, in the end, because of circumstances beyond our control, cannot be done. Hillcrest did not score in that quarter.
Never in all his life had Dynamite been so disappointed, and never had he looked upon a more radiant smile than he saw on Kentucky’s face as he approached the bench.
“We’ll get ’em,” the mountain boy promised. “Two touchdowns in the last quarter. It’s written in the stars. I saw it in my forecast this morning.”
“You been studying the stars?” Dynamite asked.
“It’s all written down in a book,” Kentucky was shedding his blanket. The hot drink from Jensie’s brown jug was still coursing through his veins.
“But, Kentucky,” Dynamite remonstrated, “perhaps Doc won’t let you.”
“He’s gone,” Kentucky grinned broadly. “Somebody’s sick, an auto accident or something. He left fifteen minutes ago.”
Dynamite was sunk. “I’d rather we lost the game,” he muttered.
By the time the whistle blew he had snapped out of that mood. Indeed he felt more cheerful than he had at any time that day. Somehow, without Kentucky at left half the picture had not been right. Now it was perfect. “All the same,” he muttered, “I’ll not send him through the line. That would be murder.”
When the hundreds of Hillcrest enthusiasts saw the slim Kentucky boy rise from his place on the bench, throw himself through a series of wild antics to set his blood racing, then walk quietly to his place behind the line, a strange silence came over them. This lasted for some twenty seconds then, like the coming of a wind storm in summer, there arose a sound that increased second by second until at last it filled all the sky. Speaking of it long after, Punch Dickman said it made his ears tingle. “It was a sign,” he added. “A sure sign of victory.”
But was it? At the start things went badly. Three line-bucks failed. The punt that followed shot straight into the air. Rabbit almost retrieved the ball, but failed. Fighting like tigers, the Naperville boys battled their way to Hillcrest’s twenty-yard line.
As Dynamite scanned the faces of his men, he read their dogged determination, but something else—a note of despair. Kentucky was not like that. He was smiling. His eyes shone. His lips were parted. He was murmuring something. Dynamite listened. What he heard sounded strange: “It’s a wet day. Somebody’s going to drop the ball.”
Then the thing happened. On a third down, the opposing team tried a forward pass. It struck the receiver’s hands, seemed to rest there a split second, then went spinning into the air. When it next came to rest, it was in Kentucky’s hands. Like a rushing prairie fire he streaked down the side line for the far away goal. Once again, in his own mind, he was in old Nicodemus’ pen. It was moonlight. A shadow approached him, a Naperville man. Flash! He was past that shadow. Another, another, and another. Flash, flash, flash, he was past them all. Two tall, slim shadows stood out before him—the goal posts. Flash, he was past them as well. Then, with a deafening roar in his ears, he came to rest standing up. A touchdown for Hillcrest. The kick was good. The score was tied.
“We can’t let it stand there,” Kentucky said tensely as Dynamite came up. “We must not!”
“You’re wonderful, Kentucky,” his team mate whispered. “But think if only one of them had hit you!”
“Dynamite,” the Kentucky boy whispered to his running mate, “I had three uncles in the great war. Only one came back. Do you think they asked themselves about machine gun bullets and shells? Football is war, Dave.
“Besides,” he added, “they can’t get me. Nobody can. Even old Nicodemus couldn’t.”
The battle was begun once more. Enheartened, Dynamite took a chance. He put his team through that five-men-back formation. Somehow it failed. The tackle was thrown for a loss. Doggedly determined, he tried again. One more loss. Third down and seventeen to go. A punt and the enemy had the ball.
By four brilliant forward passes Naperville carried the ball back to Hillcrest’s ten-yard line.
“Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown!” came from the right bleachers. “Hold that line! Hold that line!” came from the left. The nerves of every player on the field were stretched to the breaking point. Naperville charged the line. No gain. They charged again. No gain. Flash! They shot a pass. It never reached the receiver. With a leap that took him high in the air, Dynamite caught the ball, then plunged head foremost into the oncoming wall of opponents. Never had a tree been blasted, nor a mountain exploded more perfectly than was that line torn away. Never had Dynamite so deserved his nickname. He went through everything to their forty-yard line. There he was downed by the opponent’s safety man.
“Dave,” the Kentucky boy whispered, when next they prepared to line up. “One minute to go. We—we gotta’ have that touchdown. You—you know how. Don’t think of me, Dave. Forget the bullets and shells. It’s war, Dave. Let’s go through together.”
Dave set his teeth grimly. “It’s a go, Kentucky!”
And they went through. Throwing all the force of his marvelously developed body in a line plunge, Dynamite blasted a hole so wide that both he and Kentucky went through.
But Naperville had been expecting a forward pass. Her ends and half-backs were a full twenty yards behind the line. Like a troop of wild bears, they sprang at the onrushing pair.
“They must not hit him!” Dynamite was saying to himself. “They must not.” Hurling himself at the first man, he sent him spinning to the right. He tipped the second to the left. The third he missed altogether. And all this time the slim Kentucky boy hugged the ball and sped on behind him. Ten—twenty—thirty yards—for—
Dynamite struck something that was like a stone wall. He went down in a heap.
But Kentucky, racing like an escaped colt, sped on to the winning touchdown.
And then the whistle blew.
The crowd would have rushed upon the field but officers held them back. All plays begun before the whistle must be completed. There must be a trial for the extra point.
As the players began lining up, they missed Dynamite. Sudden consternation seized them as they discovered him lying quite senseless on the field.
“He’s out for good. That full-back smashed him. Take him off the field,” a doctor ordered.
“Kentucky, you may call the play,” the coach said quietly.
“All right, boys,” Kentucky whispered in the huddle, “a line plunge. Make it a good one.”
“A line—” Rabbit Jones who started to speak, felt a hand over his mouth.
A line plunge it was, and a good one, but not good enough. The score stood 13 to 7 and all Hillcrest went wild—all but one, Dynamite.
They would have picked Kentucky up and carried him on their shoulders, those Hillcrest fans, but the boy would not have it. “Dynamite,” he shouted. “Save all that for good old Dynamite. He knew it was he or I, and he—he took it.” There were tears in Kentucky’s eyes—and the crowd loved him for it.
“Kentucky,” Coach Dizney dropped in beside the slim boy as the team marched off the field, “you may ride back to Hillcrest in my car. Your friend, Jensie Crider, rode over with us.” There was a strange, new light of friendliness in his eye.
“I—” Kentucky hesitated, “I sort of reckoned maybe I’d ought to see about Dynamite.”
“Dynamite is all right,” was the coach’s reply. “He’s in good hands. He’s with Doc Owslie. He’s a fine, dependable doctor. Besides—” he was tempted to say more but stopped at this. “The other might not be true.”
“Al—all right,” Kentucky agreed. “That will be grand!”
Johnny Thompson had somehow felt from the beginning that this was to be a Hillcrest victory. No one in all the world would have given so much to watch it from the sidelines. This had been impossible. There would be, he knew right well, a grand and glorious celebration in the old home town after the game. The team would be back. All their admirers and all the girls of the school would be there and all the old grads. Were they to wander from place to place down town? By no means! The old Blue Moon was the spot for this jollification. And he should be prepared.
Having bought out an entire bakery, he had rented its ovens. Into these ovens on great dripping pans, he thrust two legs of beef, five leg o’ lambs, three hams and a half dozen pork loins.
“We’ll have hot sandwiches for all,” he said to Aunt Mandy, his colored cook. “Hot ones for all. And you, Aunt Mandy, all I ask of you is three hundred little turnover pies, all mince.”
“Lands o’ livin’, child,” Aunt Mandy exclaimed. “Three hundred!”
“Three hundred.”
“All right, son, three hundred comin’ up.” And three hundred it was.
Ah yes, it was a grand and glorious feast Johnny prepared. One thing he forgot, the big room at the Blue Moon could scarcely accommodate sixty people standing up. And a mighty horde in trucks, busses, and private cars, some even on bicycles was pouring toward the Blue Moon at sunset.
“Kentucky,” the coach said with a side-wise glance at the boy as their car glided toward home, “I gave you a chance at being captain of the team. In that last play, you could have called for a goal kick. Punch would have sent it over for that other point. You called for a line-buck. How come?”
“Well you see,” there was a tremor in Kentucky’s voice—he loved the coach and feared his displeasure more than almost anything in the world, “you see, coach, I overheard you tell Dynamite he’d played great ball this season, which he had, and that, if he won that game you’d see that he got the ball for himself for a keepsake. That—that I thought was swell.
“But you see, coach,” Kentucky was desperately in earnest now, “you see there was a big crowd heading for the gate, just back of the goal. If we tried for a goal, we’d make it all right but the ball would go into the crowd and then—somebody’d plug a hole in that ball, let out the air and tuck it under his coat. So-o—”
“So you passed up your chance to give Dynamite a break.”
“Yes—yes. That’s it. It was all right wasn’t it, coach? Wasn’t it now? We—we didn’t need the point. The game was over and we—we’d won and everything.”
“Yes, Kentucky.” There was a wide smile of approval on the coach’s face. “It was more than all right. It was sporting! Just grand, Kentucky!”
“I—I’m glad,” Kentucky murmured. Kentucky had been worried about Dynamite but the instant he climbed from the car he spotted him. He was standing at the edge of the gathering crowd. Grinning a broad grin he said, “’Lo, Kentucky. Who won the game?
“It’s all right, old Kentuck,” he laughed. “I’m not a ghost. It takes more than a Naperville man to knock me out for keeps. That fellow rammed his head up under my chin and put me to sleep, that’s all. When I woke up, I felt better than ever. I’d had a good rest.” He laughed merrily.
When Johnny saw the crowd, he called loudly for help. The team responded to a man. They carried two steaming legs of beef, five leg o’ lambs, three hundred pies and all the rest of the feast to the big gym floor. There everybody feasted to his heart’s content.
Who was to pay the butcher and baker? In such a jam there was neither time nor opportunity to collect nickels, dimes, and quarters. Johnny had been too busy to notice such a trifling detail. It was not, however, entirely neglected.
“And now,” a big burly grad, wearing a tall paper hat exclaimed, “we shall proceed to pass the basket.”
Seizing one handle of a huge baker’s basket, he invited a pal of other days to join him, and together they made the rounds. The clink of silver and the flutter of green paper was heard and seen in every corner of the broad floor.
At last, hunting up Johnny, they set the basket before him. The leader said:
“With the compliments of an admiring throng to the good scout who discovered our winner, Old Kentucky.”
Then such a shout as went up from the throng. “Give and it shall be given unto you,” Johnny thought as he tried in vain to swallow a lump in his throat.
“Well, Kentucky, old boy,” Johnny said as they sat by the big glowing stove in the Blue Moon sometime later, “the big war is over. All you got to do now is study and help me here a little. All I got to do is to keep making this place a success. The old Blue Moon,” he murmured these last words softly.
“Yes,” the slim boy agreed, “that’s all, but somehow, Johnny, that makes me feel like a plumb flat tire.”
“That,” said Johnny in an impressive tone, “is just the way I feel.”
Did the old Blue Moon and Hillcrest hold them both? When Johnny sat dreaming of Panther Eye and his two strange companions of another world, did he always succeed in dismissing them from his memory?
Your guess is as good as ours, but if you really want to know you will have to read that other bookThe Seal of Secrecy. What was the seal and what the secret? Read and see.
Red Dynamite