BY

RALPH D. PAINE

The chief interest in “The Freshman Full-Back” is that of character.  The action has real dramatic quality and is staged with the local color of a college contest.  But the great value of the action is ethical, for it shows that one may “wrest victory from defeat” and that it is a shameful thing to be a “coward and a quitter.”

THE FRESHMAN FULL-BACK

[Footnote:  From “College Years,” by Ralph D. Paine.  Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]

The boyish night city editor glanced along the copy-readers’ table and petulantly exclaimed: 

“Isn’t that spread head ready yet, Mr. Seeley?  It goes on the front page and we are holding open for it.  Whew, but you are slow.  You ought to be holding down a job on a quarterly review.”

A portly man of middle age dropped his pencil and turned heavily in his chair to face the source of this public humiliation.  An angry flush overspread his face and he chewed at a grayish mustache as if fighting down rebellion.  His comrades at the long table had looked up from their work and were eyeing the oldest copy-reader with sympathetic uneasiness while they hoped that he would be able to hold himself in hand.  The night city editor felt the tension of this brief tableau and awaited the threatened outbreak with a nervous smile.  But Seeley jerked his green eyeshade so low that his face was partly in eclipse, and wheeled round to resume his task with a catch of the breath and a tone of surrender in his reply.

“The head will be ready in five minutes, sir.  The last pages of the story are just coming in.”

A much younger man, at the farther end of the table, whispered to his neighbor: 

“That’s cheap and nasty, to call down old man Seeley as if he were a cub reporter.  He may have lost his grip, but he deserves decent treatment for what he has been.  Managing editor of this very sheet, London correspondent before that, and the crack man of the staff when most of the rest of us were in short breeches.  And now Henry Harding Seeley isn’t any too sure of keeping his job on the copy-desk.”

“That’s what the New York newspaper game can do to you if you stick at it too long,” murmured the other.  “Back to the farm for mine.”

It was long after midnight when these two put on their coats and bade the city editor’s desk a perfunctory “Good-night.”

They left Henry Harding Seeley still slumped in his chair, writing with dogged industry.

“He’s dead tired, you can see that,” commented one of the pair as they headed for Broadway, “but, as usual, he is grinding out stuff for the Sunday sheet after hours.  He must need the extra coin mighty bad.  I came back for my overcoat at four the other morning, after the poker game, and he was still pegging away just like that.”