The next play came with the speed of thought and, like a radio flash, was executed. Kentucky went straight through the place left by the leering guard. It looked like a touchdown. But no, he was thrown hard, just one yard from the goal line.
“What a break!” Dave exulted. “First down and a yard to a touchdown!”
The crowd saw it all and went into hysterics. Hats soared high. Girls screamed. An old grad fell backward off the bleachers, barely escaping a broken neck. The bleachers were a riot.
But what was this? Players on both teams leaped into action. They began piling up, pulling and hauling. When it was all over, Ballard, white faced and panting, was dragged from the bottom of the heap.
There had been a fight going on beneath that pile. Kentucky and that leering Naperville guard had been at it tooth and nail.
“He was cho—choking me!” the Naperville guard gasped. “He—he nearly killed me.”
“What happened, Ballard?” the coach asked, crowding in.
The Kentucky boy made no reply. He was white as marble and shaking like a leaf. He turned, pushed his way through his own team and walked unsteadily to the bench to drop upon it like a sack of sand.
A hush fell over the throng. The referees conferred. There was nothing for it, whatever the cause, the Kentucky boy had started a fight. Fifteen yards penalty for Hillcrest.
Less than two minutes to play and sixteen yards to a touchdown. Hillcrest lost heart. Four downs and only four yards gained. Naperville took the ball. They booted it down the field. The whistle blew. The game was over.
“Only a tie,” came a murmur from the bleachers. “Only a tie and we might have won.”
“Only a tie and we might have won,” the words were taken up by more than one player. But Ballard, Old Kentucky as they had lovingly called him, such a short time before, did not hear. He was not there. He was far away, how far no one seemed to know.
An hour later Johnny Thompson found the Kentucky boy sitting in a chair beside the range in the cook room of the Blue Moon. He was all crumpled up like a rag doll and still shaking like a leaf in the wind. Once, when Johnny was in Central American jungles, he saw a monkey caught in a wire trap. He too had been all crumpled up and trembling. Ballard was like that. A great wave of remorse swept over him. “Shouldn’t have brought him up here,” he told himself savagely. “Belongs down there in the mountains, he does, down there where men are free as squirrels or woodchucks.”