As the referee’s whistle sent the Bloss and Landon basket-ball teams scurrying to their positions the following evening, Hazel Wayne leaned forward, with a quick intake of breath. The game was about to begin. Whatever the outcome might mean to the workers and friends of the two factories, it meant infinitely more to her. She told herself that the Landon five would win, that it must win; but she could not stifle the fear in her heart.
“We’ll beat them,” said the girl at her right, a fellow worker in the Landon executive offices; “yes, we’ll beat them if——”
“——if Vern Judd doesn’t score too many baskets against us,” finished another Landon worker. “They say he’s a wonder.”
They both nodded sagely. The fear in Hazel Wayne’s heart became a hysterical laugh. Of course! And Vern wouldn’t try too hard, after what she had told him; surely he wouldn’t!
“Ready, Landon?” asked the referee.“Ready, Bloss?” He shot the ball high into the air, piped a shrill blast on his whistle as it began to descend, and the great game was on.
The two opposing centers leaped for the yellow ball. But Vernon Judd was the quicker and the surer. His right hand slapped it, shooting it unerringly to Captain Murphy. The thud hurt Hazel Wayne like a blow.
Dully, despairingly, she watched Murphy catch the ball and pass it to Clark, who shot it clear across the court to Felber. By this time Judd was racing up the middle, practically unguarded. As the ball came to him in a long, driving throw, he dropped it to the floor, tapped it closer to the basket, and then, with a pretty toss, looped it upward and forward, scoring the goal. At the end of the first minute, the score stood: Bloss, 2; Landon, 0.
Huddled forward in her balcony seat at the other end of the gymnasium, Hazel Wayne allowed her breath to escape with a gasp. He was trying, then; he was playing his best. Perhaps, though, this was only a flash, to allay suspicions. She would wait a little while before she condemned him.
Again the opposing centers leaped for the ball; again Vern shot it to a member of his team. This time, however, a lanky Landon youth intercepted the throw from Murphy to Clark, and the ball bounced out of bounds.
It was Bloss’ throw-in, and Felber, left guard, picked it up. Captain Murphy called a quick signal, dodged under the arm of the player who was covering him, and took the throw in the extreme left-hand corner of the court, in Landon territory. The other three players shifted to the boundary lines. Vernon Judd, dodging free, sped down the middle of the unprotected court.
Hazel Wayne watched him with fascinated eyes. She knew the play; it was the old crisscross forward pass. Why didn’t the Landon boys cover Vern? Must he assume the entire responsibility for the failure at the end? For she told herself positively that he would fail, that he had done all they might reasonably expect of him.
Murphy threw, gauging ball and player to a nicety. Ten feet beyond the center Vern caught it while running at full speed. Then, with a single bewildering movement, he lifted it high above his head and shot another basket with clean precision.
The score was now: Bloss, 4; Landon, 0. The Bloss adherents raised the rafters with their mad cheering. In the little balcony at the other end, Hazel Wayne leaned back with clenched hands.
“He doesn’t care enough for me to do what I asked,” she told herself bitterly; and she forced herself to smile and nod when the girl at her right expressed the hope that something would happen to Vern Judd before the game was done. She wished something would—almost! Not a serious hurt, of course, but——
By the time the ball was in play again, the Landon team seemed to have found itself. It reasoned rightly that if the other four Bloss players were to act as “feeders” to Judd, counting on him to shoot the baskets, the thing to do was to corner and pocket and guard him so closely that he would have no opportunity for unhampered throwing. So effectively did they carry out this campaign that for ten minutes or more he was hopelessly entangled in the mesh of opposing players.
They went farther. The Bloss star now began to bear the brunt of every attack. His arm was hacked on throws. He was tripped and fouled in all the artistic ways that could escape the eyes of the official. Twice he went to the floor with a crash, and once he was tumbled headfirst out of bounds.
But Hazel Wayne, watching thegame with the eye of an expert, dared hope there was another reason for Vernon Judd’s sudden eclipse. And when the Bloss rooters began to move uneasily as he failed to score goals, and shrunk back when he should have charged, and submitted tamely to an opponent’s making a pass when he should have scrimmaged for a toss-up, she grew more and more convinced that he was no longer doing his best.
A little later, the referee caught a Landon player fouling him, and Vern took the ball for a free throw. Poising it carefully, he shot it high in the air, a good five feet to one side of the basket. The Bloss sympathizers, mouths open to cheer the scoring point, allowed them to close with dumb amazement. It wasn’t even a good try.
“Now watch us!” bragged the girl by Hazel’s side. “I heard this afternoon that Vern Judd had sold out, and I guess he has.”
Hazel looked at her with troubled eyes. All at once she felt cold and sick, as if something terrible had happened.
“It looks that way,” agreed the girl on her left. “Well, every man has his price. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes business politics, and sometimes a woman. I wonder——” And she glanced at Hazel out of the tail of her eye.
“He—he wouldn’t sell out,” Hazel told the girl weakly. “He isn’t that kind.”
The other laughed meaningly. “Isn’t he? Oh, I don’t——Look! Look! What do you think now?”
Vern had been clear for once. The ball came to him waist-high—and he dropped it! Like a flash, the captain of the Landon five caught it up and shot it half the length of the court to another player near the boundary line. He passed it to a third, who scored a neat goal on a side diagonal pass that gave him the ball directly in front of the basket.
The score was now: Bloss, 4; Landon, 2.
“A goal at last,” said one of the girls, sighing, “thanks to Mr. Judd.”
“It was an accident,” defended Hazel, angry without reason. “Anybody is apt to drop the ball now and then.”
Both teams scored again from the field before the end of the first half, and, during the last minute, Landon crept closer on a palpable body-check and free throw. When the whistle blew, the score was: Bloss, 6; Landon, 5.
The teams changed goals. The Bloss basket was now at the balcony end, where Hazel Wayne could lean forward and look straight down into it.
On the toss-up that began the second half, Vern’s attempt to whack the ball was so weak that it brought a hiss or two from the spectators. Worse still, it made them watch him suspiciously after that. When he failed twice on free throws, and Murphy took his place after the next foul, the crowd began to mutter.
“What do you think now about the little angel named Vern Judd?” triumphantly demanded the girl on Hazel’s right.
“I—I don’t want to talk, please!” said Hazel. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t understand her own emotions or the wonderful metamorphosis of her desires. Something had changed her whole point of view. The integrity of Vernon Judd meant more to her, all at once, than anything else in the world. Indignant at first that he should play so well when she had asked him not to, she was now praying that he would yet do his best, that he would strive to win like a clean sportsman, that he would forget everything save his own honesty and good name. If he wasn’t that kind——She dared not complete the thought.
The game wore on, with varying fortunes. Players from first one team andthen the other rushed the ball up and down the court in zigzagging passes, tapping, tossing, dribbling, shooting it from man to man, looping it for the basket, scrambling for it when it missed, and trotting back to their positions when a goal was scored.
Eventually the Landon five began to assume the upper hand. There was no denying that its center outclassed Vern—or, at least, the Vern who was playing to-night. He could throw better, he could block better with his arm, he could bat the ball better on the toss-up. Because of these advantages, Landon finally assumed the lead by the slender margin of a single point in the 9-8 score.
“If I could only talk to him for a minute!” Hazel whispered to herself, watching the player fail in encounter after encounter. “If I could tell him to forget me, and play—play! I must have been mad to ask him to sacrifice himself for me!”
She watched, with staring eyes, as he whacked clumsily at the ball.
“Vern!” she called appealingly. “Vern!”
But he couldn’t hear her, of course. The whole gymnasium was a Babel of confused shouts. She could only lean forward, with her hands clutching the balcony rail, and follow him with her eyes; gloating when he broke free or handled the ball, wincing when opponents crashed into him, and telling herself always that if the opportunity offered he would prove his true character yet.
Some official at the side of the court made an announcement. Hazel could not hear what he said, and she turned to a man behind her for the information.
“It’s the usual warning that there are only three minutes more to play,” he explained.
Three minutes! Why, it couldn’t be possible. There must be some hideous mistake! Only three minutes before the game ended—and Landon one point ahead! That meant, unless some miracle took place, Bloss was beaten—beaten because a girl had asked a man to forget honor for her sake.
She had no watch. Yet she must time the game to its bitter end. The torture of waiting constantly for the final whistle, without knowing what moment it might come, was too great a strain to bear. Already her heart was pounding——
With a sudden inspiration, she dropped the finger tips of her right hand upon the pulse of the other wrist. The normal heartbeat was a little over seventy, wasn’t it? That meant practically a surge of the artery for every second.
She began to count—one, two, three, four, five, and so on up to the end of the first minute. Out on the floor, the ten players were scurrying here and there like frightened ants, apparently without aim or purpose, but in reality dodging and running with preconceived plans. But neither team scored again. Nor did Vern stand out conspicuously in the playing.
The second minute measured itself by her pulse beats. Now and then, during some tense moment, her fingers pressed so hard that she lost the steady throb-throb of the wrist. But she knew within a second or two when the final minute of play began.
The antlike players shifted toward the Bloss goal. They were almost constantly within throwing distance now, and one accurate toss would win. A dozen times the chance seemed to have come, but always there was some blocking Landon opponent.
“Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four,” Hazel went on mechanically. Then, with a convulsive start, she realized what the figures meant. They were the final grains of sand in the hourglass. Her finger tips shook free of the wrist,and it was three seconds before they pressed the pulse again.
“Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” she resumed her counting, and lost the next beat as her heart stopped with the shock of apprehensive fear. Then she laughed with nervous relief. Sixty pulse beats weren’t quite a minute; there were from ten to fifteen still to record before the final whistle.
The ten players bunched just below the balcony, in front of the Bloss goal. As if realizing that the game depended upon their work during the next few seconds, they roused themselves above their natural speed and skill.
“Five fighting to prevent another basket,” Hazel told herself, “and four fighting just as hard to make it—no, five! Five! He is trying! I know he is! Oh, he must be!” But she could not be quite sure.
She saw Captain Murphy whisper something to him. Vern nodded. Then, so suddenly that she could hardly follow the play, the Bloss team scattered. The ball catapulted to the side of the court, where the whacking arm of Felber drove it back and toward the other end. Murphy caught it, whirled completely around to throw off the guard hovering near him, started a dribble, and finally made the pass straight toward the Landon goal.
Hazel raised her eyes in wonderment. Nearly halfway down the court Vern was sprinting. A warning cry from the captain made him turn on his heel and throw up his hands. But he was an instant too late. Clean and hard, with the crack of a gun, the ball caught him full in the face, staggering him backward.
He stood there, blinking like one who has suddenly lost his sight. The ball was in his hands. From all angles the Landon five rushed toward him. His own players shouted for the ball. His test had come, Hazel told herself breathlessly. Then, as he made no move, she stopped breathing altogether.
Her eyes were blurring with tears. She lifted her handkerchief to dry them, and saw that it was the square of Irish lace he had rescued the day they first met.
“Vern!” she called, putting all the breath of her full lungs into the cry. “Vern!”
He lifted his head. His eyes were winking rapidly, and he had difficulty in seeing her at all.
“Vern!” she called again. Leaning far out over the protecting rail of the balcony, she allowed her handkerchief to flutter down toward the basket below. It settled on the little ledge where the bracket of the iron rim met the wall.
There must have come to Vernon Judd the memory of that other time when he had arched a ball up and over and down upon Hazel Wayne’s Irish lace handkerchief. Perhaps the recollection brought confidence in his ability to do it again. Now, with a swinging, overhand-loop shot, he hurled the yellow basket-ball at the white target.
Like a winging swallow it rose till it reached the apex of its arc; then it sped downward to the backing board just behind the basket. The rebound drove it against the front rim. It bounded back again, brushed the handkerchief caressingly, and finally toppled gently into the netting for a goal. Almost on the instant, the final whistle shrilled.
The game was ended. The Bloss five had won by a score of 10-9.