He was feeling good now, and the team was beginning to click. They liked Pop Dolan, and they didn’t like Cramp, and they were out for blood. They weren’t saving themselves for another game because most of them weren’t expecting to play another.
Flash went around end on the next play and Ken Martin passed. The minute he saw the pass he knew he couldn’t make it. He ran like a wild man, but his fingers just grazed the ball. It went down and Chadwick recovered.
Flash turned and started back up the field and saw Schaumberg and Ken Martin standing together. He started toward them, and they stood there waiting for him.
“You deliberately passed that ball out of range!” Flash accused Martin.
“Moran, you’re a fool!” Martin said. “If Lon Cramp gets this club you stand to make more money than you ever did!” Suddenly Flash was sure he knew who the other men had been that day in the woods. It had been Makin and Rossario…and, in the car, where he could barely be seen, Ken Martin!
“Yeah?” Moran’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to know a lot about it!”
“I do,” he said harshly. “I’m going to be the manager!”
Unseen by Schaumberg or Martin, Red Saunders had come down behind them and stood listening. Suddenly, he stepped up. “Who’s captain of this team?”
“I am,” Martin declared flatly. “What about it?”
Red turned abruptly and walked to the edge of the field where he began to talk to Pop. “You get off the field,” Flash told Martin. “Captain or not, you’re finished!”
“Yeah?” Martin sneered. “You’ve had this coming for a long time!”
The punch started, but it was a left hook, and too wide. It came up against the padded side of his helmet and Flash let go with an inside right cross that dropped Martin to his haunches. Ken came up fast, and Flash caught him full in the face with one hand then the other! He felt the nose bone crunch under his fist. Then Schaumberg started a punch that was suddenly picked out of the air by Lew Young, who returned it, and Schaumberg went down.
Pop came out on the field then, and his eyes were blazing. The umpire came up, shouting angrily. There were a few words, and Ken Martin and Schaumberg were rushed off the field.
* * *
THE TEAMS LINED up. Brogan tried to come through the center, but Krakoff had taken a beating by then, and when Young hit him he went back on his heels and Higgins went through after Corbett and they dropped Brogan in his tracks.
Flash saw Chadwick catch up a handful of dust and rub it on his palms. It was a habit the swift-footed runner had before he took the ball. Even as the ball was snapped, Flash saw Butch Hagan dump his man out of the way. Then he drove through the hole like a streak and hit the red-jerseyed Chadwick before he could even tuck the ball away!
He knocked Chadwick a dozen feet, the ball flying from his hands. Lew Young was in there fast and lit on the ball just as the pileup came.
They lined up and it was the Tigers’ ball on the Bear thirty yard line. Flash got away and Saunders shot a pass to him. He took the ball running and saw Brogan cut in toward him. He angled across toward Brogan, deliberately closing up the distance, yet even as the big fullback hurled himself forward in a wicked tackle, Flash cross-stepped and shoved out a stiffarm that flattened Brogan’s nose across his face, and then he was away.
Chadwick was coming, and drove into his pounding knees, clutched wildly, but his fingers slipped and he slid into the dirt on his face as Flash went over for a touchdown!
Simmons kicked the point and they trotted back to midfield. Krakoff took the ball on the kickoff but Higgins started fast and came down on Krakoff like a streak. He hit him high and Butch Hagan hit him low, and when they got up, Krakoff was still lying there. He got up, after a minute, and limped into position.
There was smeared blood on Brogan’s face from his broken nose and the big fullback was mad. Chadwick was talking the game, trying to pull his team together.
They lost the ball on the forty yard line and Higgins recovered for the Tigers. They were rolling now and they knew it. Flash shot a bulletlike pass to Saunders and the redheaded young lawyer made fifteen yards before he was slammed to the ground by Chadwick.
Chadwick was the only man on the team who seemed to have kept his head. Wilson came in for Brogan and when they lined up, Butch Hagan went through that line like a baby tank and threw an angle block into Wilson that nearly broke both his legs! Wilson got up limping, and Butch looked at him. “How d’you like it, quitter?”
* * *
WILSON’S FACE FLUSHED, and he walked back into line. On the next play Hagan hit him again with another angle block, and Wilson’s face was pale.
Flash rifled a long pass to Simmons and the former All-American end carried it ten yards before they dropped him. On the next play Higgins went through tackle for the score.
The Bears had gone to pieces now. Wilson was frankly scared. On every play his one urge seemed to be to get away from Butch Hagan. Krakoff and Brogan were out of the game, and the Tigers, playing straight, hard, but wickedly rough football, rolled down the field for their third straight score.
They lined up for the kickoff, and Flash took it on his own thirty-five yard line, angled toward the sidelines and running like a madman hit the twenty yard line before he was downed. They lined up and Saunders went through center for six. On a single wing back Higgins made six more, and then Simmons took a pass from Flash and was finally downed on the five yard line. Then Flash crashed over for the final score, driving through with five men clinging to him.
And the whistle blew as they got up from the ground.
* * *
FLASH WALKED SLOWLY toward the dressing room, his face mud streaked and ugly. Pop was standing there, waiting for him.
“You saved my bacon, son,” he said quietly. “I can’t thank you enough!”
“Forget it,” Moran said quietly, “it wasn’t me. It was those friends of yours. And give Butch Hagan credit. He lined up six or eight of them himself, to say nothing of what he did on the field.”
He turned to go, and Micky was standing there, her face pale and her eyes large. She lifted her chin and stepped toward him.
“Flash, I’m sorry. Pop never believed, but for a while, I did. He—Ken—made it sound so much like you’d done something crooked.”
“It was him,” Flash said quietly. “I’m sorry for your sake.”
“I’m not,” Micky looked up at him, her eyes wide and soft, “I’m not at all, Flash.”
“But I thought—?”
“You thought I was in love with him? That I was going to marry him? That was all his idea, Flash. He never said anything to me about it, and I wouldn’t have. I went with him because the man I really wanted never asked me.”
“He must be an awful fool,” Flash said grimly. “Why, I’d—!”
“You’d what, Flash? You better say it now, because I’ve been waiting!”
“You mean—?” Flash gulped. Then he moved in, but fast.
Lew Young stuck his head out of the door, then hastily withdrew it. “That Moran,” he said, grinning, “may be slow getting an idea, but when he does—Man, oh Man!”
A Night at Wagon Camp
* * *
NO HORSES STOOD in the corral, no smoke rose from the chimney. Jake Molina slid his rifle from the boot and rode with it across his saddle.
The squat, unpainted shack, the open-faced shed, the pole corral, the stock tank filled with water piped from the spring…nothing had changed. It was bleak, lonely, and drought stricken as always.…
Molina dismounted, careful to keep his horse between himself and the house. Pike should have been here to meet him but there was no sign of life, anywhere. The ranch had been abandoned ten years before, and looked it.
Rifle in hand he crossed to the house, pausing on the step to turn for one more careful yet uneasy glance.
The kitchen was empty but for a bare table, and a broken chair that lay on its side. Crossing to the fireplace he turned a charred stick with the muzzle of his rifle, then knelt and put his fingers upon it for an instant. It was cold and dead.
There were two more rooms. Using his rifle like an extension of his arm he pushed open the doors, but there was nothing but a dried-out, sunbaked boot, and a coat that had been dropped on the floor. There was no dust on the coat however, and it lay in a scuffle of recent footprints…in this abandoned place here was something that did not fit, something important to his quest.