18
Doc in Trouble

Suddenly, one morning in 1920, in a dingy hotel room in Carson City, Nevada, Doc had realized that, were he to grow a beard, it would be grey. At forty-three he was not old, but he was aging; and even the daily running, though it gave him a physical capacity far beyond a man half his age, could not stop the clock. Soon after, his hair had started to thin rapidly, and by his late forties he had been almost completely bald.

For some years later Doc had made a pathetic attempt to wrap the remaining hairs on the left side of his head in a wet flap across his bald pate, but after a while he gave up, instead contenting himself with the rest of his body’s continuing efficiency.

It is never easy for an athlete, uniquely sensitive to his physical capacities, to accept the gradual fade into middle-age. In many ways the athlete is far more aware of this decline than the ordinary man, for the stopwatch is neutral and merciless. Thus it was with Doc Cole. By forty-six he could no longer run twelve miles within the hour; by the age of forty-eight even running ten miles in fifty minutes had become difficult. He saw that his running was slowly slipping away from him, despite a mind and a will that were as sharp and determined as they had been when he had met the challenges of Dorando and Longboat twenty years before.

It therefore seemed to Doc that his one talent was going to vanish into the mists of sporting legend, to be classed with the feats of the fell-runners of England or the speedy Ute Indian, Candiras de Foya, who had run nine seconds for a hundred yards in 1901. Doc Cole would simply become a footnote in a Ripley “Believe It or Not” ragbag of sports history, unfit even to be mentioned in the same breath as a Nurmi or a Kohlemainen.

Doc scraped the last of the soap from his chin and peered into the broken mirror suspended on the side of the tent. The sun surely made you look younger even if you were as bald as a coot, he thought.

He doused his face with cold water and dried off with a rough towel. Still half an hour behind Stock, he was now half an hour ahead of Hugh McPhail and Morgan, with Eskola, Mullins and Son closing in fast, and Capaldi every day a danger. The fact that he and the others had an agreement made no difference to Doc, for the money meant nothing to him. If his life was to possess any meaning then he must get into New York first. After all, what else was there? A thousand carnivals, a hundred thousand bottles of Chickamauga remedy sold – that could hardly add up to a life. But winning the Trans-America, the greatest test of an endurance athlete – that would be something.

Doc had over the years devised a variety of techniques to take his mind off the fatigue and boredom of running. First there was the “physical” method. In this he went through a detailed inventory of his body’s movements, checking their efficiency as a mechanic might check the parts of a car.

Wrists: relaxed, thumbs up, fingers lightly pinched. That would take him through a few more minutes. Head: still, relaxed, sitting on a vertical spine. That would take him a few yards further. Jaw: loose, lower lip relaxed, would take him further yet. Then to his feet. He would check on their alignment as they hit the ground: there had to be the minimum splay, and a solid heel-first landing on each stride.

Thus Doc would reduce the monotony of the miles, the dull pain of the flat dirt-road daily spinning endlessly into the distance. The checklist method had the added advantage of refining and making more efficient his running technique; even a fraction of a per cent improvement in each stride meant a lot when he was taking over eighty thousand strides a day.

Inventory complete, Doc would go back over it again and again before he moved on to another device, the “inner method”. He had learnt it from Fu Li, an old Chinaman with whom he had travelled the carnivals in the 1912–20 period. Fu Li, though no athlete, had shown an immediate sympathy for Doc’s desire to run, even when there was no longer professional competition. “In running,” he said, “every day you conquer yourself anew.” Fu Li’s method was to have Doc move inside, to forget both technical detail and fatigue. “Think of your body as a still, hollow tube, through which air passes endlessly. Move back into that stillness, into that peace.” And so Doc would move away from the pain, the road, the crowds of well-wishers, his rivals, into just such a cool inner world.

Sometimes, however, these methods simply would not work, and Doc found that chatting with other runners or taking note of the surrounding geography was the only way to pass the boredom and leaden fatigue of the miles. Thus on each stage he plucked from his past experience some device, some trick, some mechanism of the mind that would drag his body towards the next checkpoint.

But it was going well. All the experience of the past was enabling him at fifty-four years of age to run stride for stride with a tireless young German. Daily he checked his inventory and found it complete: all parts in working order.

It came so suddenly, the pain, that Doc recognized it immediately: the old enemy, those few millimeters of tendon tissue that had so often in the past denied him victory. And there it was again, in the same old place, at the bottom of his right calf, in the Achilles tendon. It was not yet desperately sore but it was undoubtedly a warning. Luckily, it came at the end of a stage, just as they were closing in on Salina, Kansas, about four hundred miles east of Denver, at the end of the day’s second section of twenty-three miles.

Hugh felt the break in his companion’s rhythm, sensed that Doc was slowing down, and looked to his left.

“Nothing,” said Doc. “You go on ahead.”

Hugh paused for a moment, but Doc pushed him on, putting the flat of his hand to Hugh’s shoulder-blades. The cars of local sightseers blew dust into the runners’ eyes as they padded towards Salina, and a couple of hundred yards ahead they could hear the inevitable Whiffenpoof song. Hugh moved through the field over the last couple of miles to finish in sixth place, with Doc six places behind him.

Hugh noted that Doc was limping slightly as he finished.

“How are you?” he asked anxiously.

“Just been visited by an old friend,” said Doc, scowling. He peeled off his tattered shoes, bending down to gently pinch the top of his right ankle. “Bum Achilles. Beat me in Baghdad in 1910, again in Rome in 1912. It’s no big surprise. I’ve been waiting for it – it was bound to come at these distances, on these surfaces, running day in, day out.”

They walked together towards the main tent, now both in their bare feet. When they reached the tent Doc fished deep in his knapsack and pulled out a pair of worn leather boots. “Here’s the answer to the problem,” he said. “Boots.”

He pulled them on over his leathery brown feet and started gingerly to walk around the tent.

“The next two days I walk and run in these,” he said, pulling his sweat-sodden vest over his head. “The high heel keeps tension off the Achilles; rests it up good.”

“Walk?” said Hugh. “But you’ll lose hours!”

Doc bared his teeth and bit his lip. “Perhaps. I reckon I can walk at a steady five miles an hour. If now and then I run a little maybe I can bring that up a little. In two days that means a loss of about one and a half hours on Stock.”

Doc unlaced the boots and replaced them carefully in his knapsack.

“I’ve no choice, Hugh,” he said. “If I keep running on this Achilles in sneakers I’ll end up in hospital by Topeka. Two days’ rest, plus . . . this.” He broke off to pull out a bottle of Chickamauga remedy, carefully poured some of the fluid into his left hand and kneaded it gently into his right Achilles tendon. “Whatever else it does, one thing Chickamauga sure as hell is good for is tendon injuries. Meantime you’ll have to carry the flag for us for the next couple of days, hang in with Stock, and hold off all those outlaws closing in from the back.”

He smiled ruefully and continued to knead the Chickamauga into his ankle. He was in deep trouble, and no one knew it better than he. Now almost an hour behind Stock, even at best he would be two and a half hours, almost thirteen miles, behind by the end of the next two days. By that time Capaldi, Morgan, Eskola and Bouin, already close, would be an hour or more ahead of him.

And that was at the very best. If the Achilles tendon took another couple of days more to mend then by the end of the week he would be four hours behind Stock. Until now Doc had run easily, but such a deficit would mean daily stints on the edge of exhaustion for the next half of the race to catch up. Doc grinned painfully as he lay back on his bunk, head cupped in his hands, the sweat of the day’s run glistening on his lean little body.

If it had to be done, if he had to walk the tight-rope all the way to New York, then so be it. He had trained for thirty years for the Trans-America and no Achilles tendon was going to stop him now.

Next morning Doc watched Hugh and the leaders stream off far in front of him at a steady six and a half miles an hour. Ahead of him were at least seven hundred runners, their feet throwing up clouds of dust from the dry Kansas field on which they had camped. He was alone, plodding in thick, heavy boots, for the first time in the bottom half of the field, amongst the stragglers, the trotters and walkers, eating their dust on the soft dirt ribbon of road towards Abilene.

As the runners slowly unravelled themselves Doc saw Kate Sheridan only twenty yards ahead look back and pick him out.

“Want some company, Doc?” asked Kate, dropping her pace to run beside him.

“Glad of it,” said Doc gratefully. “But won’t I slow you up?”

Kate shook her head. “I’m down to about five miles an hour for the next couple of hours anyway,” she said. “The curse. I’ll pick up tomorrow. I can do with the company.”

She glanced down at his heavy brown boots but said nothing. Doc realized that she had noticed his footwear and pointed down at his feet.

“An old Doc Cole remedy,” he said, smiling. “For the ancient Achilles.”

Kate nodded. “Are you hurt bad?”

Doc shook his head.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” he said. “An old enemy. I’ve beaten it before. I’ll do it again. Just you watch me.”

He tapped his sweating scalp. “One thing I’ve learnt,” he said, “is to listen to my body. All that Achilles of mine is asking for is a couple of days rest. Then I’ll be up there with Stock and the others, burning up the road to Kansas City. Just you mark my words, lady.”

Doc walked the next six miles in silence. He had no idea if his leg would heal in time. If it did not then the Trans-America would be irretrievably lost, here on the flat fields of Kansas, the easiest running ground of the race. He was glad that Kate had remained equally quiet, for there was nothing she could say to comfort him. He would just have to pray that, after all these years, his body would not let him down.

Even in boots Doc, who had race-walked many times, could just make a steady five miles an hour, and Kate trotted easily beside him.

Even after five miles, he knew it. He had been right. The tendon, only slightly inflamed, responded well to the raised heel and the walking pace, and at the second feeding-station at ten miles he stopped to cool his foot in a rocky stream by the roadside. Cold running water had always eased it in the past. He enjoyed the feeling of the icy water lapping over his feet as he sat on a rock beside Kate and noted that at least a score of runners had also stopped to cool themselves.

He cupped some water in his hands and lapped it like a dog, pouring the residue over his head. He scowled. Only ten miles run, and already the leaders were over three miles ahead, and going away from him. He had dropped a couple of places on aggregate time and the lead he had established on everyone but Stock was melting away.

He looked up at the morning sun and shielded his eyes. The sun was his friend. It would slow down even Stock to well inside six and a half miles an hour and lessen the effect of his enforced walk.

Thank God, the Trans-America was slowing down in the hot plain of Kansas. If only he could keep the deficit down . . .

It was the strange, twisted paradox of super-fitness. The fitter you were, the closer you were to injury, the closer to tearing or inflaming that microscopic area of tissue that would stop you as surely as any bullet. Thus, from being a running machine, capable of churning out nine-minute miles an hour, day after day, he was now a near-cripple.

Doc felt a deep sick feeling in his stomach. One hundred thousand miles of running, a heart pumping at a steady thirty-three beats a minute, a body made for travelling long distances. But all of it counted for nothing here on a hot, dusty dirt road to Abilene, plodding along at a miserable five miles an hour.

Yet beneath the sick-heart feeling Doc knew that thirty years of running had prepared him for just this crisis, not the moment of triumph but a challenge even greater than the covering of three thousand miles across America. For it was the manner in which he faced failure which was going to be his sternest test.

He had, of course, failed before. In 1908, in the blinding heat of the London Olympics, he had succumbed to hypothermia at twenty miles and had ground to a halt. Afterwards, when he had travelled north immediately following the Games, to compete in professional fell races, though there had been failure there had been no dishonour. At rural games at Grasmere and Burnsall Doc had faced specialist fell-runners, iron-legged shepherds, who, hands on knees, had chugged remorselessly up crippling crags, and, on the way down, leaped like stags through the bracken in massive bounds towards the finish. Those fell races had produced local muscular agonies which he had not previously experienced and which he was not to face again till twenty-odd years later in the Rockies. But he had faced the fells of the Lake District, and if he had not exactly conquered them certainly it had been an honourable draw.

Doc wiped the sweat from his face, looked up at the sun and checked his watch. Kate was now far in the distance out of sight and he was alone, lying in about four hundredth position. Again his thoughts drifted back . . .

Dorando, Longboat, Shrubb, Appleby, all those great runners of the past, where were they now? Jesus, he must have trotted through three generations of runners. They had come, taken their share of notoriety and applause, made their mark on the history of athletics, and vanished. But who would ever remember Doc Cole? Perhaps the Trans-America was the last opportunity to prove himself. Perhaps now was the real test. The next couple of days would tell. Doc ended the day’s stint in the crowded, dusty main street of Abilene, having preserved a sturdy six miles an hour over the two twenty-mile stages. His hips were stiff from the unaccustomed action of walking, but he was still in the race.

 

Topeka Chief of Police Wilbur T. Fiske took off his silver badge and placed it on the table in front of him. Forty years on the force, thirty of them under that amiable shamrock, O’Brien, and ten of them free and clear on his own as chief.

Free and clear. For there had not been a single major decision that he had taken for himself in all those ten years. When a businessman’s son had been found drink-sodden, having driven a car through Stacey’s Department Store window, it was Chief Fiske who had smoothed things over and arranged the pay-off. After all, he and Stacey were both masons. When the order had come for the department to stay out when the meat packers brought in hoodlums to break the strike of 1929, he had let his men stand idly by, while thugs made bloody gargoyles out of decent, hard-working men.

Free and clear. In only three days he would indeed be free and clear, his pension assured. And now the order had come from Mayor Matson to keep the Trans-Americans out of the city until way after midnight, to allow them only to run through dark, unlit streets. He had checked on the race, and he could see no reason for the Mayor’s decision. Knowing Mayor Matson, it was bound to be something political, something rotten. Still, it was no skin off his nose, not after ten years of cleaning up Matson’s dirt.

And then the call had come. At first he could not believe it, that Miss McAllister herself had actually telephoned him, addressed him by his first name, was asking his help, in the doing of God’s work. He had listened dumbstruck as she had told him what she wanted of him, of what his brothers and sisters all over America, indeed all over the world, required of him, of Wilbur T. Fiske. He dimly remembered kneeling by the telephone, sobbing, begging that his sins be washed away. Yes, she had said, do only this and your sins will indeed be washed away, as if in the River Jordan.

Free and clear. Free and clear and clean on the evening of 2 May the stroke of midnight. For the call had come, and this time Wilbur T. Fiske was not going to be found wanting.

 

1 May 1931: It was getting better. Slowly, but it was getting better. Doc had long since become aware of every nuance of his muscular system, every good and bad message it sent him. This third day would therefore be the last day of walking and trotting in boots across the soft Kansas roads, the thin veins that criss-crossed the waving seas of supple May wheat.

Even five miles an hour was hard walking, but Doc went back to the vigorous hip-swivel which he had used as a race-walker, pumping his arms across his lean body. After he had warmed up he moved to a faster jog-trot, his speed limited only by his boots, and this took him cutting through the middle of the sluggish field. He was again on the move.

Now, back at two hundred and twentieth position and still holding twenty-sixth place on aggregate time, Doc had time to study the men with whom he was running. Kovak, the gimpy Czech, carrying one leg shorter than the other, because of a polio infection in his youth. The Czech had limped and hobbled nearly two thousand miles on a leg not fit to support a chair, let alone 140 pounds, hitting the ground ten thousand times a day, six days a week. But Kovak had never stopped running, and was now closing in on Topeka, the State Capital of Kansas, groaning every step of his lop-sided way. With him was Carl Blake, the young Kansas farmer, whose land had blown away in one week in 1930, and who was running only a few miles from the same stricken fields which he had once tilled and cherished. Blake, bowed, skeletal, black with sun, his feet hardly leaving the ground, shuffled through Kansas at a steady five miles an hour. Every stride looked to be his last, but still somehow he kept on going, sweat streaming from a body that looked drained of all fluid.

Just ahead of Doc was the little Irishman, Matt O’Carrol, his sweat-sodden green vest sticking to his back. O’Carrol ran with teeth tightly clenched, foaming slightly at the mouth. For him, too, every stride looked an agony as he and Blake ran side by side, the gaunt Kansan and the tiny, bandy-legged Irishman.

Blake, Kovak, O’Carrol and at least a thousand others, none of whom had the slightest chance of being in the money in New York: why did they keep running? Doc was surprised that the question had ever even occurred to him. They ran because this was the moment which no landlord, no employer, no politician, could take from them. They had stood in dole queues, taken hand-outs and pay cuts, watched while plump politicians had pursued their whirligig of conferences. They had watched, impotent. It had not taken them long to realize that others were going to win the Trans-America, nor had it taken them long to reach their personal decisions to continue. They had come to run across America and no one on earth was going to stop them. No, there was no need to ask why these men kept running.

The fields were endless, rolling seas of green wheat, billowing and flowing into the horizon. Occasionally the houses of rich farmers would rise up above the wheat like crusaders’ castles: gaunt, white-slatted wooden houses, cool and still as they had been in that hot autumn of 1914 when Doc and his road-show assistant Lily Hudson had worked in the Kansas harvest. He remembered the chanting, white-robed priests and the smell of incense before they had started the harvesting. The harvesters were horse-drawn and Lily and the women had scampered behind them, throwing the bales to the side for the men to stack. Then came the back-breaking job of pitch-forking the wheat on to the carts. Doc had watched the fluid movements of men twice his age forking high and easy and had tried to copy them – fruitlessly. Within minutes the pain in his arms and shoulders forced him to rest on his pitchfork. He was soon abruptly reminded by the foreman that no work meant no pay.

Doc’s distance-training had served him well in those first painful days. True, distance-running had done nothing to prepare the specific muscles required for this type of work. What it had taught him was that he could suffer almost any amount of muscular discomfort. He had run through it, so he could harvest through it.

Each night Lily had rubbed Chickamauga into his stiff arms and shoulders, as they listened to the strains of a crazy fiddle or peasant camp-fire songs from all over the world. In the mornings, before work, he had talked to the gnarled peasants who had been brought by cattle truck from Chicago to the East to bring in the Kansas harvest. They had shown him how to place the bales relative to his legs, how to keep the pitchfork close to the body, how to swing the bales upward in a single, economical, flowing movement. They had taught him the rhythm of rural labour.

Doc had been a quick learner. Within a day he was keeping up with the best of them, feeding the greedy trucks with their supply of wheat. In the evenings he lay with Lily out of the light of the camp-fires, exploring her firm sunburnt body beneath the coolness of her cotton dress.

Concordia, autumn 1914. It had been hard; but those had been good days. Lily was now in far-off Chicago, the owner of her very own hairdressing parlour. And he was running through that same land, with the same kind of men as those with whom he had harvested in those far-off days.

 

Two miles ahead, at the front of the pack, where Doc longed to be, Lord Peter Thurleigh was racing for real. He now daily ran stride for stride with Stock; but he ran in a panic. In the past, whatever the stress of studies or athletics competition, there had always been in the background the certainty, the comfort of his wealth. He had not realized how much he had depended on that background.

Until he had arrived in Los Angeles he had been unable to take the Trans-America completely seriously. Indeed, until he had seen the Los Angeles hotels and boarding-houses choked with Trans-Americans and journalists and had read newspaper reports of Flanagan’s first press conference he had half-suspected that the Trans-America might be some gigantic hoax and that Flanagan, whoever he was, was safely established with the competition entry fees in some far-off Mexican hacienda.

The reality of the first days on the road had ended all such thoughts. This was indeed real. The disappearance of his butler and Rolls-Royce in the Mojave had only underlined the fact that he was going to have to tap every resource if he was to take the smiles from the faces of his adversaries back at the club in London; the disappearance of his family fortunes even more so.

Thurleigh had soon realized, too, that the world of Oxford and of genteel amateur athletics had done nothing to prepare him for the Trans-America. For this was not a race of a few minutes of pain or discomfort like the Olympic five thousand metres. Here, in the Trans-America, it hurt all day and every day. And each day there was some new problem, a blister to be lanced, a stomach upset to be treated, a tendon to be nursed, sunburned ankles to be salved. Peter Thurleigh had got used to calves and thighs from which a dull soreness never retreated, but had never become accustomed to the permanent pain in his joints and bones.

After only two hundred miles he had thought he would have to give up, that there was no way he could stand three months of pounding on the dirt roads of America, living nightly in the reek of liniment, sweat and human excrement. But slowly the Trans-America had both infected and absorbed him. It was nothing to do with the wager he had made, even though now his financial future depended on it. Rather, like Kate Sheridan and the others, Thurleigh had become engaged in a battle with himself. It was a battle which he was never quite certain of winning, but one which he grew to relish.

The receipt of his father’s telegram informing him of the loss of the family fortunes in some strange way freed Peter Thurleigh. Now there were no buffers, no cozy retreat if things went wrong. Like all the other competitors he was on his own, with no safety net to catch him if he failed. That knowledge gave him the daily jolt of adrenalin which took him through the hard miles.

He had asked to join Doc’s group, not out of any sense of weakness but rather because he could sense the camaraderie which had developed between Doc, Hugh, Morgan and Martinez; even the frail childlike Martinez seemed to have drawn strength from the group. He felt, too, that in their company he could only learn and grow and absorb something of a world which, up till then, had been as remote to him as the surface of the moon. But Doc had prevaricated and had asked Thurleigh to wait till the conclusion of the race against Silver Star in St Louis.

 

Behind him, Martinez, Morgan and McPhail ran as a unit. Martinez and Morgan had joined Doc and Hugh’s “co-operative” back in Abilene. Henceforth they all would share whatever the Trans-America brought them, working under Doc’s guidance. Their orders were to keep Stock in sight, but not to become involved in racing with him. For the first ten miles they had run behind Stock and Thurleigh, and watched the back of Thurleigh’s silk vest gradually darken as it absorbed his sweat.

Directly behind them pressed Eskola, Bouin and Capaldi, themselves tracked by the Jap, Son, and the sinewy Australian, Mullins. The race was telescoping, as the first two thousand miles loomed ahead in St Louis, now only four hundred miles away.

 

Kate was finding it difficult to think of anything but Morgan, of his body pressed against hers in the darkness of the strange room. Daily, as she cut through the green Kansas fields, she recalled each moment, from the first tentative touch to her final cry. She found it impossible to believe that he felt as she did: so much of Morgan was hidden from view. Gradually, however, she had learned about his past. She sensed his guilt, his feeling that in being with her he had betrayed his dead wife.

“Look, Mike,” she had said, “from what you say I think I would have loved her too. I haven’t taken you over from her. I’ve taken you on. So don’t ever forget her.”

Morgan looked straight at her. “You would have liked each other,” he said.

Her running had become automatic, freeing her mind to think of him as she continued to pass man after man. With the Rockies behind her, she at least was relishing the flat roads of Kansas.

 

Doc picked up and passed Kate early that morning, and started to cut easily through the field. By the end of the day, at Wamego, he would be two hours down on Stock, an hour down on the others. That would mean that he would have to battle with Stock for at least a week even to regain his second position. Beyond that he could not think, for he could see no way of actually catching Stock if the young German maintained his present form. Such a performance by a young athlete was outside Doc’s experience, for distance-running had always been the province of men in their thirties and forties, men race-hardened with thousands of miles of running.

Doc took his food on the run now, thus gaining half a minute at each feeding-station. Flanagan had, mercifully, given up the peanut butter sandwiches back in the Mojave, providing instead light, easily digestible snacks of fruit, chocolate and water, milk and saline lemon drinks.

Doc poured the remains of his drinking water over his head as he trotted down the main street of McFarland, and waved at the cheering crowds as he picked up another carton of water from the feeding-station. As he did so a little boy in brown corduroys pushed his way out of the crowds and stood in front of him. The boy, who could not have been more than nine or ten, held in his hands a grubby school exercise book and a short, stubby pencil.

He looked back anxiously at what Doc guessed were his classmates in the crowd. “Could I have your autograph, sir?” he asked, finally.

It was the first time Doc had been asked for his autograph by a child since the London Olympics.

“Have you any idea of my name, sonny?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his hands.

“Yes, sir,” replied the boy. “We see movies of the race at the Roxy every week. You’re Doc Cole the runner, and me and my buddies have a dollar on you getting first to New York.”

“Doc Cole the runner,” whispered Doc under his breath. To the boy he said, “I’ll try to help you hang on to that dollar.”

He laid down the carton of water on the table beside him and slowly wrote on the first page of the boy’s exercise book.

“Alexander (Doc) Cole, with best wishes to . . .” he wrote, then looked at the boy.

“Just put ‘the boys of McFarland’, sir,” said the boy, standing on tiptoe to look over Doc’s shoulder as Doc completed the autograph.

Doc closed the exercise book and handed it back to the boy. He leant down and kissed him on the cheek, to the applause of the crowd. A tear trickled down his own cheek. Doc drew the back of his hand across his eyes and trotted down the main street, waving at the crowds as he did so. Tomorrow he would start to catch up, all the way to St Louis. Doc Cole would show them some fancy running.

 

As usual, Peter Stock had led all the way, and now, at one in the morning, three miles outside Topeka he chugged behind the brightly-lit Trans-America truck, which blared Rudy Vallee and The Whiffenpoof Song from its loudspeaker system. A quarter of a mile behind followed Eskola, Thurleigh, McPhail, Martinez and Morgan, followed in turn by Mullins and Son. The rest of the field was strung out for six miles along the road, with a rejuvenated Doc moving up into the low thirties now, well ahead of Kate, who was running close to three hundredth position.

Peter Stock trotted wearily across the unlit Kansas Avenue in the residential area of the town, followed by the purring black Mercedes containing the German team staff. There was not a streetlight in town, for the mayor had acted on his instructions from Toffler.

Flanagan turned on all the Trans-America caravan lights and beamed the searchlight on top of the caravan on Stock.

The Trans-America trundled quietly into the darkness of Main Street, passing the Capitol Building on its right. The shopping precinct was completely still.

“Like a graveyard,” Flanagan said, chewing on his cigar at the window of his caravan.

Suddenly there was the shrill hoot of a policeman’s whistle. The lights of every shop in the street flooded on, blinding Stock and the stream of runners behind him. At the same time the headlights of hundreds of cars, lined for half a mile on each side of the street, sprang to life. It was like daytime, and the runners cruised through the street bathed in a sea of light.

The whistle shrilled again and the street reverberated to the noise of a thousand car hooters, working in unison. A third whistle brought waves of sustained applause, for there were at least five thousand people lining the main street. A fourth whistle signalled a brass band at the finish to start up with “See the Conquering Hero Comes”.

Once again Flanagan’s men were amongst friends as men, women and children from the crowd came out to shake their hands and give them sweets and drinks. The runners were engulfed in a sea of Topekans.

Willard Clay stopped the Trans-America caravan beyond the finish. A portly figure in dress uniform stood facing Flanagan as he left the caravan. The man pumped Flanagan’s hand warmly.

“I’m chief of police, Wilbur T. Fiske,” he said. “You’ll be Mr Flanagan. My apologies for the lack of streetlights, but I hope our little welcome made up for it. Our ladies are along at your camp now fixing up some special victuals for your boys. Miss McAllister can’t be here herself but she asks to be reminded to you kindly.”

“Miss McAllister’s a very kindly lady,” said Flanagan.

“All the Lord’s work,” said Fiske. “All the Lord’s work.”

“Then praise the Lord,” said Flanagan. “Sure praise the Lord.”

 

Alice Craig McAllister had done her work well. And it was as well that 3 May was a rest day, for Wilbur Fiske’s religious convictions had not prevented the provision of copious quantities of bootleg liquor.

“God,” said Hugh, “I should have stuck with the orange juice.”

“Don’t expect any sympathy,” Doc laughed. “Be like me,” he said, putting on his boots. “Live clean. Come on, let’s walk some of that moonshine out of your system.”

They strolled out in the bright morning sunshine on to the dirt-road leading to Lawrence.

“There won’t be any Huckleberry for the next week or so,” said Doc. “I’m healed up now, but I’m lying about sixtieth on aggregate. Maybe I’m wrong, but I want to pick up an hour or so on Stock in the next four hundred miles. Won’t feel comfortable otherwise. That means that I’m going to have to beat the pants off that splendid young Kraut every day next week.”

“Isn’t that taking a risk?” said Hugh. “Couldn’t you bust your Achilles again, or simply exhaust yourself catching him up?”

“That’s a risk I’ve got to take,” replied Doc. “At least the roads up ahead are mainly soft dirt-track, easy on the Achilles. And I’ve been running inside myself till now, apart from the Rockies. No, I’m going to have to show Mr Stock some sweet running, run the legs off him, every stage. I’ve got to get back up in the main pack, and that means gaining a half an hour a day for the next week or so.”

“Reckon you can catch Stock?” asked Hugh, chewing on a straw.

For a moment Doc was tempted to tell Hugh of his suspicions of Stock. He had seen other runners on drugs like cocaine and strychnine. Hell, in 1912 a Frenchman had tried arsenic before a marathon in Cairo. It had worked well, helping him to a second place a few minutes ahead of Doc, but most of his prize money had later been absorbed in hospital bills. No, it was best to keep his suspicions about Peter Stock to himself.

He shook his head.

“Not if he keeps going the way he’s been doing so far. Eskola, Mullins, Son, Bouin – these guys I can understand, even someone like you, but this boy Stock is running out of his skull. Where does it come from? We’d never heard ‘of him, or his buddy, Muller, before he ended up in a basket in Denver. And what about the rest of those cold, blue-eyed beauties? Jesus, they’re like something from another planet.”

“And what about this race Flanagan’s fixed us up with once we get to St Louis?” asked Hugh.

“All part of life’s rich pattern,” said Doc. “If we get the contract right then we just might give this Levy guy a run for his money. If not, then it will be a farce. Sure as hell Thurleigh will run his guts out for us. He’s asked to team up with us, but I haven’t thought it through yet. So I’ll tell him that we’re using it as a trial to see if he can join the group. And you know what Morgan is like.”

“But a horse – ” Hugh began.

“A trotting horse, a sprinter,” said Doc. “Pulling a two-hundred-pound bag of lard over cross-country for ten miles. Do you remember how long it took you to condition yourself for distance-running?”

Hugh nodded.

“Well, that horse has got just one week,” said Doc. “It couldn’t condition itself for a cold shower in that time.”

He picked up a stone and threw it along the road.

“The long road to St Louis,” he said. “Four hundred miles. I’m going to hurt some in the next week. But sure as hell so is Mr Stock. You can count on it.”

 

Doc was as good as his word. The pace had dropped to inside six miles an hour across the flat roads of Kansas, but Doc, now running with heel supports in his shoes, lifted it to just over eight-minute-mile pace. Even so, Stock would not give way, and daily the little bald man and the blonde youth ran stride for stride, spinning the rest of the field out behind them. Doc was putting to use thirty years of experience, thirty years of knowing exactly what pace he could sustain over a day’s running. But Stock hung on, silent, impassive, never giving a yard.

They reached Lawrence together, he and Stock, half an hour ahead of the field, bringing Doc up to twenty-first position on aggregate. Then on into Kansas City, running together through the scrapwood shanties of the town, the settling point of the “Exodusters”, freed Negroes from the south, into the city, past Wyandot Park, where rested the bones of the chiefs of the Wyandot Indians. Doc burnt off the young German and another lost fifteen minutes were picked up on the stage which finished in the roaring crowds of Kansas City, bringing him up to fourteenth position. It was going well: he was closing in. But he was still a long way from Stock on aggregate time.

Then another dusty fifty miles to Concordia, Missouri, again locked with Stock all the way. Doc moved up to twelfth position.

It was on the road between Concordia and Colombia that at last Stock started to wilt. It was almost perceptible. Doc felt the young German suddenly weaken and lose his rhythm, and in a matter of seconds he had dropped back and had eased to a shambling trot.

Doc pressed home his advantage and ended up twenty minutes ahead of the next finisher “Digger” Mullins. He was now eighth on aggregate, back up among the race-leaders.

An hour later Doc stood in a field outside Colombia with a hundred others below the primitive showers which Willard Clay had constructed, enjoying the lukewarm water as it dripped unevenly from above and streamed down his body. He rubbed the red carbolic soap which he was holding with both hands and wiped the foam beneath his armpits.

“All I want is all there is, and then some,” he crooned.

Dimly, through the steam of the shower and the gathering gloom, he could see Willard Clay hastening towards the washing area. It was the first time he had ever seen Willard run.

Doc stepped out of his cubicle and was stretching for his towel as Willard finally reached him, blowing heavily. Flanagan’s lieutenant paused for a moment to regain his breath. Then –

“It’s Peter Stock,” he said. “We think he’s dying.”

 

Maurice Falconer was the first to speak. “He’s in the emergency ward of the City Hospital,” he said, pulling his fingers through his grey hair.

“The doctors are doing all that they can. He collapsed after finishing,” explained Flanagan.

“What do the medics say?” asked Doc.

“They’ve never seen anything like it,” rejoined Falconer.

“His rectal temperature was a hundred and four point seven degrees Fahrenheit, while his heart was going at one hundred and eighty beats for half an hour.”

“And what do you think?” asked Doc, turning to Falconer.

“Drugs – just like you thought. Maybe not cocaine, but something like it. See this?” Falconer held up a small unmarked bottle of pills. “I picked it up when I visited the German team quarters. Five will get you ten that it’s some sort of depressant, some dope which dulls the inhibitory centres.”

“You mean that it blocks the natural feelings of pain that you experience in fatigue?” said Doc.

“Exactly,” said Falconer. “But it’s probably more complicated than that. God knows what else they’ve been pumping into him – some goddam crazy cocktail of drugs. No one knows what happens to the body when you put it into a stress situation like the Trans-America, but when you start adding some godawful mix of drugs into a man, who knows the end of it?”

He put his head in his hands. “It’s a mess. One hell of a mess.”

The telephone rang.

“It’s the hospital,” said Willard, answering it. “For you.” He handed the telephone to Flanagan.

Flanagan listened for a moment.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said. “We’ll call back in the morning.”

He dropped the telephone on to its rest, but his hand remained on the receiver. “He’ll make it,” he said. “He’s out of danger.”

“Thank God,” said Falconer.

Flanagan stood up.

“Well, what do we do?”

“What do you mean?” said Doc.

“I mean, how do we get the Krauts out of the race?”

“I see,” said Doc. “Do you have anything in the rules to cover it?”

“We used the IAAF amateur rules,” said Flanagan.

“Nothing much there about drugs.”

“So, technically, they’ve done nothing wrong?” said Falconer.

“The hell they have!” shouted Flanagan. “Goddam cheats. All you guys running your balls off twice a day while those blue-eyed superior Aryans, or whatever the hell they call themselves, are running up front like something out of Wagner. Goddam – ”

“Don’t blame Muller or Stock,” said Doc. “Those young guys probably had no idea what was being pumped into them. Probably thought it was some sort of vitamins.”

“Doc’s right,” said Falconer. “It’s Moltke and his gang of coaches you should tear into. They’re the real culprits.”

“But how?” said Flanagan. “They haven’t broken any race rules. More to the point, there’s no means of proving they took drugs.”

Doc stood up.

“When I’m not running I read newspapers,” he said. “In fact it’s like a drug: I can’t do without them. Now I read in the papers that these National Socialists made it big in the elections last December, but they’ve had a lot of internal splits. And they’re not in power yet – so the last thing they want is bad publicity. It’s not much good saying that the master race have to take drugs to win the Trans-America!”

Flanagan’s eyes narrowed.

“So what are you telling me to do?”

“Get Moltke in here. Tell him that if he doesn’t withdraw his team you’ll make it all known to the press. See what he says then.”

Flanagan looked at Willard. Willard nodded.

“Okay,” Flanagan said. “Willard, wheel in the Master Race . . .”

 

The Germans withdrew from the Trans-America the next morning. The official announcement was that the team management wished to return Muller and Stock for specialized medical treatment in Germany, and were, therefore, forced to withdraw the remainder of their runners.

For the first time Hugh McPhail was now in the lead, with a hundred miles to go to St Louis. And his battle with a horse called Silver Star.