The Gold Bat by P. G. Wodehouse (novels for students .TXT) 📗

got off, or the school back pulled up the attack with a fine piece of defence.  Sometimes the shouting would give place to clapping when the school was being pressed and somebody had found touch with a long kick.  But mostly the man on the ropes roared steadily and without cessation, and with the full force of his lungs, the word “Wrykyn!”

The scrum was a long one.  For two minutes the forwards heaved and strained, now one side, now the other, gaining a few inches.  The Wrykyn pack were doing all they knew to heel, but their opponents’ superior weight was telling.  Ripton had got the ball, and were keeping it.  Their game was to break through with it and rush.  Then suddenly one of their forwards kicked it on, and just at that moment the opposition of the Wrykyn pack gave way, and the scrum broke up.  The ball came out on the Wrykyn side, and Allardyce whipped it out to Deacon, who was playing half with him.

“Ball’s out,” cried the Ripton half who was taking the scrum.  “Break up.  It’s out.”

And his colleague on the left darted across to stop Trevor, who had taken Deacon’s pass, and was running through on the right.

Trevor ran splendidly.  He was a three-quarter who took a lot of stopping when he once got away.  Jevons and the Ripton half met him almost simultaneously, and each slackened his pace for the fraction of a second, to allow the other to tackle.  As they hesitated, Trevor passed them.  He had long ago learned that to go hard when you have once started is the thing that pays.

He could see that Rand-Brown was racing up for the pass, and, as he reached the back, he sent the ball to him, waist-high.  Then the back got to him, and he came down with a thud, with a vision, seen from the corner of his eye, of the ball bounding forward out of the wing three-quarter’s hands into touch.  Rand-Brown had bungled the pass in the old familiar way, and lost a certain try.

The touch-judge ran up with his flag waving in the air, but the referee had other views.

“Knocked on inside,” he said; “scrum here.”

“Here” was, Trevor saw with unspeakable disgust, some three yards from the goal-line.  Rand-Brown had only had to take the pass, and he must have scored.

The Ripton forwards were beginning to find their feet better now, and they carried the scrum.  A truculent-looking warrior in one of those ear-guards which are tied on by strings underneath the chin, and which add fifty per cent to the ferocity of a forward’s appearance, broke away with the ball at his feet, and swept down the field with the rest of the pack at his heels.  Trevor arrived too late to pull up the rush, which had gone straight down the right touch-line, and it was not till Strachan fell on the ball on the Wrykyn twenty-five line that the danger ceased to threaten.

Even now the school were in a bad way.  The enemy were pressing keenly, and a real piece of combination among their three-quarters would only too probably end in a try.  Fortunately for them, Allardyce and Deacon were a better pair of halves than the couple they were marking.  Also, the Ripton forwards heeled slowly, and Allardyce had generally got his man safely buried in the mud before he could pass.

He was just getting round for the tenth time to bottle his opponent as before, when he slipped.  When the ball came out he was on all fours, and the Ripton exponent, finding to his great satisfaction that he had not been tackled, whipped the ball out on the left, where a wing three-quarter hovered.

This was the man Rand-Brown was supposed to be marking, and once again did Barry’s substitute prove of what stuff his tackling powers were made.  After his customary moment of hesitation, he had at the Riptonian’s neck.  The Riptonian handed him off in a manner that recalled the palmy days of the old Prize Ring—­handing off was always slightly vigorous in the Ripton v. Wrykyn match—­and dashed over the line in the extreme corner.

There was anguish on the two touch-lines.  Trevor looked savage, but made no comment.  The team lined up in silence.

It takes a very good kick to convert a try from the touch-line.  Jevons’ kick was a long one, but it fell short.  Ripton led by a try to nothing.

A few more scrums near the halfway line, and a fine attempt at a dropped goal by the Ripton back, and it was half-time, with the score unaltered.

During the interval there were lemons.  An excellent thing is your lemon at half-time.  It cools the mouth, quenches the thirst, stimulates the desire to be at them again, and improves the play.

Possibly the Wrykyn team had been happier in their choice of lemons on this occasion, for no sooner had the game been restarted than Clowes ran the whole length of the field, dodged through the three-quarters, punted over the back’s head, and scored a really brilliant try, of the sort that Paget had been fond of scoring in the previous term.  The man on the touch-line brightened up wonderfully, and began to try and calculate the probable score by the end of the game, on the assumption that, as a try had been scored in the first two minutes, ten would be scored in the first twenty, and so on.

But the calculations were based on false premises.  After Strachan had failed to convert, and the game had been resumed with the score at one try all, play settled down in the centre, and neither side could pierce the other’s defence.  Once Jevons got off for Ripton, but Trevor brought him down safely, and once Rand-Brown let his man through, as before, but Strachan was there to meet him, and the effort came to nothing.  For Wrykyn, no one did much except tackle.  The forwards were beaten by the heavier pack, and seldom let the ball out.  Allardyce intercepted a pass when about ten minutes of play remained, and ran through to the back.  But the back, who was a capable man and in his third season in the team, laid him low scientifically before he could reach the line.

Altogether it looked as if the match were going to end in a draw.  The Wrykyn defence, with the exception of Rand-Brown, was too good to be penetrated, while the Ripton forwards, by always getting the ball in the scrums, kept them from attacking.  It was about five minutes from the end of the game when the Ripton right centre-three-quarter, in trying to punt across to the wing, miskicked and sent the ball straight into the hands of Trevor’s colleague in the centre.  Before his man could get round to him he had slipped through, with Trevor backing him up.  The back, as a good back should, seeing two men coming at him, went for the man with the ball.  But by the time he had brought him down, the ball was no longer where it had originally been.  Trevor had got it, and was running in between the posts.

This time Strachan put on the extra two points without difficulty.

Ripton played their hardest for the remaining minutes, but without result.  The game ended with Wrykyn a goal ahead—­a goal and a try to a try.  For the second time in one season the Ripton match had ended in a victory—­a thing it was very rarely in the habit of doing.

* * * * *

The senior day-room at Seymour’s rejoiced considerably that night.  The air was dark with flying cushions, and darker still, occasionally, when the usual humorist turned the gas out.  Milton was out, for he had gone to the dinner which followed the Ripton match, and the man in command of the house in his absence was Mill.  And the senior day-room had no respect whatever for Mill.

Barry joined in the revels as well as his ankle would let him, but he was not feeling happy.  The disappointment of being out of the first still weighed on him.

At about eight, when things were beginning to grow really lively, and the noise seemed likely to crack the window at any moment, the door was flung open and Milton stalked in.

“What’s all this row?” he inquired.  “Stop it at once.”

As a matter of fact, the row had stopped—­directly he came in.

“Is Barry here?” he asked.

“Yes,” said that youth.

“Congratulate you on your first, Barry.  We’ve just had a meeting and given you your colours.  Trevor told me to tell you.”

XVII THE WATCHERS IN THE VAULT

For the next three seconds you could have heard a cannonball drop.  And that was equivalent, in the senior day-room at Seymour’s, to a dead silence.  Barry stood in the middle of the room leaning on the stick on which he supported life, now that his ankle had been injured, and turned red and white in regular rotation, as the magnificence of the news came home to him.

Then the small voice of Linton was heard.

“That’ll be six d.  I’ll trouble you for, young Sammy,” said Linton.  For he had betted an even sixpence with Master Samuel Menzies that Barry would get his first fifteen cap this term, and Barry had got it.

A great shout went up from every corner of the room.  Barry was one of the most popular members of the house, and every one had been sorry for him when his sprained ankle had apparently put him out of the running for the last cap.

“Good old Barry,” said Drummond, delightedly.  Barry thanked him in a dazed way.

Every one crowded in to shake his hand.  Barry thanked then all in a dazed way.

And then the senior day-room, in spite of the fact that Milton had returned, gave itself up to celebrating the occasion with one of the most deafening uproars that had ever been heard even in that factory of noise.  A babel of voices discussed the match of the afternoon, each trying to outshout the other.  In one corner Linton was beating wildly on a biscuit-tin with part of a broken chair.  Shoeblossom was busy in the opposite corner executing an intricate step-dance on somebody else’s box.  M’Todd had got hold of the red-hot poker, and was burning his initials in huge letters on the seat of a chair.  Every one, in short, was enjoying himself, and it was not until an advanced hour that comparative quiet was restored.  It was a great evening for Barry, the best he had ever experienced.

Clowes did not learn the news till he saw it on the notice-board, on the following Monday.  When he saw it he whistled softly.

“I see you’ve given Barry his first,” he said to Trevor, when they met.  “Rather sensational.”

“Milton and Allardyce both thought he deserved it.  If he’d been playing instead of Rand-Brown, they wouldn’t have scored at all probably, and we should have got one more try.”

“That’s all right,” said Clowes.  “He deserves it right enough, and I’m jolly glad you’ve given it him.  But things will begin to move now, don’t you think?  The League ought to have a word to say about the business.  It’ll be a facer for them.”

“Do you remember,” asked Trevor, “saying that you thought it must be Rand-Brown who wrote those letters?”

“Yes.  Well?”

“Well, Milton had an idea that it was Rand-Brown who ragged his study.”

“What made him think that?”

Trevor related the Shoeblossom incident.

Clowes became quite excited.

“Then Rand-Brown must be the man,” he said.  “Why don’t you go and tackle him?  Probably he’s got the bat in his study.”

“It’s not in his study,” said Trevor, “because I looked everywhere for it, and got him to turn out his pockets, too.  And yet I’ll swear he knows something about it.  One thing struck me as a bit suspicious.  I went straight into his study and showed him that last letter—­about the bat, you know, and accused him of writing it.  Now, if he hadn’t been in the business somehow, he wouldn’t have understood what was meant by their saying ‘the bat you lost’.  It might have been an ordinary cricket-bat for all he knew.  But he offered to let me search the study.  It didn’t strike me as rum till afterwards.  Then it seemed fishy.  What do you think?”

Clowes thought so too, but admitted that he did not see of what use the suspicion was going to be.  Whether Rand-Brown knew anything about the affair or not, it was quite certain that the bat was not with him.

O’Hara, meanwhile, had decided that the time had come for him to resume his detective duties.  Moriarty agreed with him, and they resolved that that night they would patronise the vault instead of the gymnasium, and take a holiday as far as their boxing was concerned.  There was plenty of time before the Aldershot competition.

Lock-up was still at six, so at a quarter to that hour they slipped down into the vault, and took up their position.

A quarter of an hour passed.  The lock-up bell sounded faintly.  Moriarty began to grow tired.

“Is it worth it?” he said, “an’ wouldn’t they have come before, if they meant to come?”

“We’ll give them another quarter