“Your rib is about healed,” the doctor had said to him. “However, if you should go into the game, and be tackled and thrown hard, it might result in permanent injuries.”
Well, doctor’s orders were doctor’s orders, but to Kentucky, had it not been for his teammates, they would have meant nothing. What were a few broken bones to the loss of the year’s game of games? It was Dynamite who had said, “You stay out until I need you.”
“But promise me,” Kentucky pleaded, “if the battle goes against you and if you think I can help, promise you’ll let me in.”
“Help, kid?” Dynamite had exclaimed. “Of course you could help. You and I could lick that Naperville bunch all by our lonesomes. And will I holler if we are getting the worst of it? You better believe I will, son!”
All the same, as Dynamite went into the game it was with a wordless prayer that little Kentucky might not be needed.
From the very start it was a thrilling game. From the first, too, Dynamite was to recall the words of Kentucky’s passed on by Johnny: “Somebody’s going to drop the ball.”
Naperville led off with a great kick. Punch, who received the ball, was tackled almost at once, on the Hillcrest thirty-yard line. On two line plunges, Hillcrest picked up seven yards. Then, as Bud Tucker, who played in Kentucky’s place at half, came round the left end, he was hit hard and thrown. The ball leaped from his grasp and was recovered by a Naperville man.
“Ha! Ha! Big joke!” one of the opponents yelled. They had heard this from a defeated team. Now they evidently meant to use it against Hillcrest.
To have the ball in the opponent’s hands on one’s own thirty-seven-yard line at the start of a game is no joke. The hard-hitting Naperville steam roller crushed the Hillcrest line again and again. “First down and ten—” and scarcely a moment later once again, “First down and ten—” From the bleachers came a roar like the breaking of a wild sea:
“Hold that line! Hold that line! Hold that line!”
Kentucky sat like a mummy in his blanket, shuddering and mumbling to himself.
Then, when it seemed that a touchdown was inevitable, once again, “somebody dropped the ball.” This time it was little Artie Stark who recovered. Hillcrest’s ball on their own thirteen-yard line. A quick huddle, a sudden snapping of the ball, a ducking of the head by Punch Dickman, as if to run with it, then a leaping upward like the rise of a submarine, and a quick kick that, catching the opponents off their guard, sent the ball rolling, all unmolested to Naperville’s ten-yard line.