[Gutenberg 45140] • On Your Mark! A Story of College Life and Athletics

“All out for the mile!”

Myer, clerk of the course, stuck his head inside the dressing-tent and bawled the command in a voice already made hoarse by his afternoon’s duties. In response a dozen or so fellows gathered their blankets or dressing-gowns about them and tumbled out into the dusk of a mid-October evening. Because of the fact that on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons the athletic field was required for the football contests it was necessary to hold the Fall Handicap Meeting on one of the other days of the week. This year it was on Friday, October 17th, and because the Erskine College faculty does not permit athletic contests of any sort to begin before four o’clock on any day save Saturday, the mile run, the last event on the program, was not reached until almost six o’clock; and in the middle of October in the latitude of Centerport it is almost dark at that time.

It was cold, too. A steady north wind blew down the home-stretch and made the waiting contestants dance nimbly about on their spiked shoes and rub their bare legs. That wind had helped the sprinters, hurdlers, and jumpers very considerably, since it had blown against their backs on the straightaway and the runway, enabling them to equal the Erskine record in two cases and break it in a third. It was Stearns, ’04, the track-team captain and crack sprinter who, starting from scratch, had performed the latter feat. Until to-day the Erskine record for the 220-yards dash had been twenty-two seconds flat; this afternoon, with the wind behind him all the way, Stearns had clipped a fifth of a second from the former time, to the delight of the shivering audience, who had cheered the announcement of the result loudly, glad to be able to warm themselves with enthusiasm on any pretext.

But if the north wind had been kind to the sprinters, the middle- and long-distance men had derived no benefit from it; for while it aided them on the home-stretch, it held them back on the opposite side of the field. The spectators had already begun to stream away toward college when Myer at length succeeded in getting the last of the milers placed upon their marks. The two-mile event had been tame, with Conroy, ’04, jogging over the line a good twenty yards ahead of the second man, and there was no reason to expect anything more exciting in the mile. Rindgely and Hooker were both on scratch and surely capable of beating out any of the ambitious freshmen, who, with a leavening of other class men, were sprinkled around the turn as far as the 200 yards. To be sure, Rindgely and Hooker might fight it out, but it was more probable that they had already tossed a coin between themselves to see who was to have first prize and who second. So the audience, by this time pretty well chilled, went off in search of more comfortable places than Erskine Field; or at least most of them did; a handful joined the groups of officials along the track, and jumped and stamped about in an attempt to get the blood back into toes and fingers.