The blue line caught fire. They fought like men full of benzedrine. They held two battering-ram bucks to a scant yard total.
The Palo Alto tribe punted on third. Coco, reversing his field, brought it up to the blue forty.
Dan banged and butted off left tackle for three.
Everson, battling for a high pass far down, missed by a fingernail. A penalty on the play, anyway. An over-eager blue guard. Holding. Third and twenty to go!
“Too far for a 90,” Coco said through his teeth. “Dan?”
“Fifty, on the snoot,” Dan spat blood. “Right.”
Lineup. Shift. Pass-back.
The ball slapping against his ribs. He cracked into the thin wedge of a hole hard enough to take a bank door off its hinges.
The guard got him, got a knee in the face, too, — and a pile-driving hand-heel on his helmet.
Dan shook him off.
The fullback missed him, — except for a hand-hold on the neck of his jersey. Dan pulled him along until Everson bodyblocked him out. Two more Indians dived in for the kill. Dan split them like an axeman working on dry pine.
When they smothered him, he was on the Stanford thirty-eight, — the blue-sweatered cheer leaders were doing nipups, — the bass drummer was beating the hide off his instrument.
First, ten and two minutes to go.
“Stand back, ev’body!” Coco tongue-lashed them. “Gonna be blood spatterin’ ever’ which way. Fifty… left!”
The spring was gone from Dan’s legs. His right wrist ached. His lungs felt as if he’d inhaled flame.
He surged up to the slot. The Stanford center slammed the door in his face. He went through somehow. A clutching hand tore his helmet off. Somebody ripped his jersey. He couldn’t see where he was going because an arm was clamped around his head. He rolled, fought, slogged ahead. They dropped the boom on him.
“First…” screeched Everson, in his ear. “Yatta boy!”
On the twenty-five. Less than a minute left.
Coco looked at him, pleading. Dan shook his head. “Ninety. Ship.” If they could do it on third, they could click with it on first, couldn’t they? Then maybe Dan could slam it over for the needed three or four yards.
It went. Slick and smooth. Ship flat on his face on the eighteen. Thirty seconds on the clock.
“Now,” Dan grunted. “Fifty, right.”
Coco shook his fists at them. “One good punch, bunch.”
A roaring in his ears, which might be the stands in hysteria… and might not. An ache… not any special place… just all over. He sucked air into his seared lungs. The ball came back.
He never did know the details until he read them in Llewellyn’s down-by-down account next morning. He had a nightmare notion he was back in the woods in a Saginaw bull fight… only now there were three men in front of him… they weren’t sticking to the rules… they were hanging onto him… trying to trip him.
Two of them were still hanging onto him when he was stopped by the post. He put out his hand, to make sure it was the goal post. He’d gone ten yards over that last white stripe.
He could barely make it back to the lineup. But Stoney let him stay in, until, — in a hush that made the ear-drums ring, — Everson carefully booted that point that made it a game… and a 1-point win!
There was still ten seconds left.
Stoney used it to send Prender in, and let Dan come off the field by himself, jogging wearily, while even the Stanford stands joined in a tumult that could have been heard halfway to Palo Alto.
X
He was looking in the mirror again when Coco came along. “Stop admiring y’self. Enough other peep to do that.”
“Just examining my black ’n’ blue marks.”
“Never mind ’em. Gent outside says he has to see you, but pronto!”
Coco took his arm. In the corridor, Frankie Caytron waited, with another man. A big bronzed individual with a face that was the duplicate of the one Dan had been inspecting in the mirror… only without Dan’s cut lip and swollen nose.
Dan scowled, darkly. He flushed. The bronzed man hesitated, held out his hand.
“I take it all back, Dan’l. You’ve shown me. You’re a ball player for anybody’s dough. Maybe you’re no razzle-dazzle broken fielder. But you sure can pound through there. And I never worked that Paycheck Pass any better in my life.”
Dan shook hands. “Didn’t know you were here, Sam,” he muttered lamely.
Caytron scoffed. “Ah! You knew all right. I got wise you knew your brother was here with the Burgers, soon’s Coco told me how fast you ducked my invitation. Up till then I thought you were Janny… and then he showed up at my place with the rest of the Pitts… and it all came out in the wash.”
“Yuh?” Dan wasn’t so sure. He went close to his famous brother. Memories crowded in.
His failure to star as a passer, as a running back, at Michigan. Sam’s bullheaded attempts to tell him how to pass, how to run, how to do everything just like successful Sam… the celebrated high scoring ‘Jet’ Janok of the pros. Dan’s difficulty, trying to make out on his own, under the handicap of being a younger brother of one of the game’s all-time Greats. His unwillingness to make the grade on the strength of big brother’s name, anyway.
And then, the bitter quarrel at home. The ugly names. The words “Lazy”, “yellow”. Other words, — nastier. His mother, stopping it. And the angry decision to get away, — far from home, — to make good on his own — without any pulling or pressuring from Sam.
As a topper, Sam’s sneering taunt: “Okay!… Okay!… But don’t ever tell anybody you’re my brother!”
“I thought you didn’t want anybody to know. Sam.” His eyes probed the other’s.
Jet Janok grinned. “You’re such a hotheaded fathead. You never did take anything seriously, — except me! I figured you’d never do any good, trailing after me. So… maybe I prodded you too hard. But I’m damn well proud of the way it worked out. And pleased. The folks will be tickled, too, when I talk to ’em on the phone tonight.”
“Did you tell St… Mister Hart? Who I was?”
“No,” drawled a lazy voice. “I did.”
Lin Hollet. In the doorway.
“I had to, at half time, or my life wouldn’t have been worth a plugged peso. I heard about Jet Jannok being in town…. and how much you looked like him… and put this and that together. When Marla found it out, why—”
“Dan.”
She was just outside. Not proper for little girls to hang around the big boy’s locker room!
“Dan,” she held out a hand. “Why couldn’t you have told me! You were wonderful!”
He purposely misunderstood her. “Will you put that in writing, shugie?”
Jet thumped him on the back.
“Introduce me to the lovely, heel.”
Dan bowed: “Marla, slip five to Samuel Adams Janok, my big stiff of a brother. I told you mom was terriffic. After putting that kind of a tag on him, she named me Daniel Webster Janok. Can you imagine having a label like that?”
“Oh, yes,” she said dreamily. “I can. I’d love it.”