Like a good doctor studying a troublesome case, Salter, having located the weakness, set to work to remove it. Without special arrangement, almost without previous appointment, the sessions before the German and Latin recitations became regular. As we have learned, Salter’s room was not a place where boys were likely to gather. The friends who used to lounge in at Strong’s to pass an agreeable half hour now found the door frequently locked and their bird flown. It was weeks before they knew that he was “living at Salter’s.” They did not know, could not know, how much Salter was doing for their unscholarly friend; how he kept poor Strong reviewing, reviewing, reviewing, until certain forms and facts were stamped into his brain in ineradicable lines; how faithfully the list of frequently missed words was kept; how Strong himself at last grew so much interested in the constant struggle to master the elusive, mocking, fugitive vocabulary, that with every new word struck from the black-list he felt a triumph as of a well-won race.
Out of doors also the two began to appear together. When Strong did his work on the track, Salter was likely to be there also, to hold the sprinter’s sweater, or give him practice starts, or try to catch his time with the stop-watch. Collins, the trainer, came at last to expect them to appear together, and having found that Salter was developing skill in timing, not infrequently asked the “second” for other services. To his own surprise, Salter became aware that his society and his stop-watch were both in growing demand.
And so two months slipped by, and the day of the school meet came. Strong could not run, for he was still under the ban of probation. He watched the sports at Salter’s side, and felt the tingle of eagerness for the fray as he saw other fellows take the races which he might have won; and his heart throbbed with an overmastering yearning like that of the hunting-dog held back by a cruel leash when the pack is starting. The more fervently did he hammer away that night at his treacherous old enemies—the Latin constructions and the German vocabulary—while the boys discussed the games, on the dormitory steps.
A few days later the news flashed about the school that Strong had “passed off” his conditions. Wolcott and Poole knew how he had done it; others who had noticed his steady improvement in recitations were not so much amazed. But after all, the feeling uppermost seemed to be that his chances for the Hillbury meet were not what they had once been. At the Hillbury school contests the week before, Howes had done the hundred in ten and two-fifths, while Joslin had won the two-twenty in phenomenally fast time. So of these two races, which in the earlier estimates of the year had been credited to Strong, Seaton could hardly expect to win more than one. The school was discouraged, and so was Strong; but in answer to all the chatter of question and doubt, Salter and the trainer smiled wisely and imitated Brer Rabbit in saying nothing. They had held the watch on their man too many times to fear a newspaper hero.