“Run, all of you, for your lives!” cried Tug; and at that the weary little band sprang forward with a new lease on strength and determination.  Tug had no ambition, like Orton, to leave his men to find their own way.  Rather, he herded them up and urged them on, as a Scotch collie drives home the sheep at a canter.

Orton’s runners were “tailed out” for more than half a mile behind him.  He himself was easily the first man home; but Stage beat his second man in, and Bloss was a good third.  Orton ran back frantically, now, to coax his last three men.  He hurried in his third runner at a fairly good gait, but before he could get him to the line, Tug had brought forward his last three men, Sawed-Off well up, MacManus going doggedly and leaning mentally, if not physically, on Tug, who ran at his side.

By thus hurling in three men at once, Tug made an enormous inroad upon the score of the single-man Brownsvillers.  Besides, though Orton got his next-to-the-last man in soon after Tug, the last Brownsviller did not come along for a minute afterward.  He had been left to make his way along unaided and unguided, and he hardly deserved the laughter that greeted him as he came over the line.

Thus Orton, too ambitious, had brought his team in with this score:  1, 3, 8, 9, 10—­total, 31; while Tug’s men, well bunched at the finish, came in with this score:  2,4, 5, 6, 7-total, 24.

Tug richly deserved the cheers and enthusiasm that greeted his management; for, in spite of a team of individual inferiority to the crack Brownsvillers; he had won by strict discipline and clever generalship.

XXIV

The victorious outcome of the cross-country run, as well as many other victories and defeats, had pretty well instilled it in the Lakerim minds that team-play is an all-important factor of success.  But the time came when there was no opportunity to use the hard-learned, easily forgot lesson of team-work, and it was each man for himself, and all for Lakerim and Kingston.

When the ground was soggy and mushy with the first footsteps of spring, and it was not yet possible to practise to any extent out of doors, the Kingston Athletic Association received from the athletic association of the Troy Latin School a letter that was a curious combination of blood-warming hospitality and blood-curdling challenge.  The Latin School, in other words, opened its heart and its gymnasium, and warmly invited the Kingston athletes to come over and be eaten up in a grand indoor carnival.  Troy was not so far away that only a small delegation could go.  Almost every one from Kingston, particularly those athletically inclined, took the train to Troy.

Most surprising of all it was to see the diminutive and bespectacled History proudly joining the ranks of the strong ones.  He was going to Troy to display his microscopical muscles in that most wearing and violent of all exercises—­chess.