Play the Game! | Page 6

to stand by, Skipper."
"Of course. I'll do your Latin and English and part of your Spanish."
"Gee, you're a brick."
"It's nothing." She dismissed it briefly. "It's my way of doing something,
Jimsy, that's all. It's the only way I can be on the team." She glowed
pinkly at the thought. "When I sit up on the bleachers and see you make
a touchdown and hear 'em yell--why I'm there! I'm on the team because
I've helped a little to keep you on the team! It almost makes up for
having to be a girl. Just for the moment, I'm not sitting up high, clean
and starched and safe; I'm on the field, hot and muddy and with my
nose bleeding, doing something for L. A.! I'm there!"
Jimsy slapped her on the shoulder like a man and brother. "You're there
all the time, Skipper! You're there a million!"
He made the first team the first day he went out to practice. There was
no denying him. He captained the team the second year and every year
until he graduated, a year late for all his friend's unwearying toil. As a
matter of fact they did not make a special effort to get him through on
time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It
was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its
numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not
seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy
King and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically

unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its
shining perfection and held it to the end. It is still a name to conjure
with at the school on the hill, Jimsy King's. The old teachers remember;
the word comes down. "A regular old-time L. A. team--the fighting
spirit. Like the days of Jimsy King!"
Other teams might score on them; frequently they could not, but when
they did the rooting section was not dashed. It lifted up its multiple
voice, young, insolent, unafraid, in mocking song, and Honor Carmody,
just on the edge of the section, beside her stepfather, sang with them:
You can't beat L. A. High! You can't beat L. A. High! Use your team to
get up steam But you can't beat L. A. High!
It rolled out over the football field and echoed away in the soft
Southern California air. It was gay, inexorable; you couldn't beat L. A.
High, field or bleachers.
Stephen Lorimer never missed a game. His wife went once and never
again.
"I suppose I am too sensitive," she said, "but I can't help it. It's the way
I'm made. I simply cannot endure seeing anything so brutal. I can't
understand those young girls ... and the mothers!" Two of her own were
on the second team, now, but she never saw them play, and they came
in the back way, after games and practice, sneaking up to Honor's room
with their black eyes and their gory noses for her capable first aid. She
was not one, Mildred Lorimer, into whose blood something of the iron
had entered. Her boys bewildered her as they grew and toughened out
of baby fiber. She was a little unhappy about it, but she was more
beautiful than she had ever been in her life, and freer, with the last little
Lorimer shifting sturdily for himself and his father more in love with
her than ever. She had more or less resigned her active motherhood to
him. The things she might have done for Honor, the selection of her
frocks and hats, the color scheme of her room, her parties, the girl at
seventeen did efficiently for herself. Her childish squareness of face
and figure was rounding out rather splendidly and she had a sure and
dependable sense of what to wear. Her things were good in line and

color, smartly simple. She had thick braids of honey-colored hair
wound round her head; her brow was broad and calm, her gray eyes
serene; she had a fresh and hearty color. Stephen Lorimer believed that
she had a voice. She sang like one of the mocking birds in her garden,
joyously, radiantly, riotously, and her stepfather, who knew amazingly
many great persons, persuaded a famous artist to hear her when she
gave her concert in Los Angeles.
"Yes," she said, nodding her head, "it is a voice. It is a voice. A little
teaching, yes; this Barrett woman who was once my pupil, she will be
safe with her. Not too much; not too much singing. Finish your school,
my little one. Then you shall come over to me for a year, yes? We shall
see what