But while Broadwood usually excelled at hockey, garnered a full share of the track and field honors, proved herself as good as her rival at baseball, and accepted defeat on the gridiron only after the gamest battles, she was weak at cross-country running and had been beaten each of the few times that she had met Yardley. Gerald, who would have liked to complete his hill-and-dale career and celebrate his year as captain with a hard-fought victory, lamented Broadwood’s weakness this year.
“I wish we might give them a handicap,” he confided to Harry that Saturday morning as they went back to the gymnasium after a two-mile jaunt. It was the day of the Forest Hill game, and partly because it seemed fair to let the cross-country runners witness the afternoon contest and partly because it was advisable to accustom the team to morning work, since the race was to be run in the forenoon, to-day’s work had started at ten-thirty. Gerald seemed as fresh as when he had started out, and save for the disks of red which had not yet faded from his cheeks, one would never have suspected that he had led nine others over approximately two miles of the hardest sort of going. Harry Merrow, however, showed the pace. He had managed to finish fourth and was rather proud of himself, although when Gerald had clapped him on the back at the finish and congratulated him he had only smiled depreciatingly.
“We might give them a quarter-mile start,” proposed Harry, with a laugh, in response to Gerald’s remark. “But I don’t see why you’re so anxious to get beaten, Gerald.”
“I’m not, but I’d like to have the race a really close one. As it is, we’re just as likely as not to finish the first four men ahead of them. I’m pretty certain we will if you run as well as you did to-day.”
“I ought to do three or four minutes better on the eighteenth,” said Harry. “How far behind you was I to-day?”
“About six minutes. And I did as well within three minutes as I ever did,” said Gerald.
Harry thought that over for a minute as they climbed the footpath that affords a short cut to the gymnasium from the village road, and before he had succeeded in figuring out what their relative positions would probably be in the race Gerald introduced a change of subject.