Finch drank, and pulled an ear-lobe, considering. An ability to make verses would hardly help him in a literary society whose active members used guns with the skill of Hyperion Weems and Impy. Would archaeology or the ability to teach college students be any better? Or a speaking knowledge of Armenian?
"I am—I used to be—good in some kinds of athletics," he ventured.
The Colonel glanced at Impy, and both men frowned, but Lee asked: "What kind of athaletics?"
"I was a coxswain. One of the ladies said something about you having a crew. Perhaps I could coach them."
"Yo' could," cried Lee. "By God, suh, if you can coach that lazy bunch of whelps you wouldn't be an athalete, you'd be a magician, sho' 'nuf! You go right ahead. This is the lucky day of the Pegasus."
As he was undressing it occurred to Finch that not only the background, but even the events of this experience corresponded almost too exactly with his desires. In bed it also occurred to him to wonder whether the Colonel really could read minds. If he could, he ought to have known what was coming in Brian MacPherson's beanery.
Ten:
"The race," explained the Colonel, "will be against the hireling minions of the Rotary Club of St. Louis. I am relying on you, suh, to see that our brave boys beat the pants off those damyankees, and I mean lit'rly."
They stood in a morning washed clean with rain, on the dock ef the Pegasus boathouse, where the Wolf joins its muddy course to the Mississippi. The shadow of the bluffs was peeling off the Hanrahan bridge from west to east.
"The sta't will be at the bridge yonder," continued Lee, with a flick of his cane. "Yo' will proceed downriver along the left fork, ci'cumnavigate President Island and return to the bridge."
"I sec," said Finch. Then, to maintain his reputation: "If you really expect to remove their pants and there are ladies present—"
"There is no po'tioh of a damyankee's anatomy, suh, that would bring a blush to the most modest brow of Southern womanhood. I tell you in strict confidence that in view of the restrictions placed on legitimate business by such rascals as the Bummingham Arcadians, it is nec-ess'ry for us to make a killing. I speak in a figurational sense. There will be some inte'esting betting on this race, and I trust the Rotarians will be reduced to a condition of epide'mis. Ah, here come our stalwart champions. Boys, come here. Meet yo' new coach and coxswain, the eccentric conve'sationalist, Mr. Arthur Finch."
Finch, self-consciously aware of the way his paunch bulged out the front of his athletic suit, returned the stares of the eight muscular, motley, and rather truculent young men who had emerged from the boathouse. His first note was that none of them in the least resembled Terry-Tiridat. A shaven-polled individual said from the midst of the group: "Kinda beefy for a cox, ain't he?"
"No heavier'n the last one," said the Colonel. "Speaking whereof and wheresotounder, yo' will understand that this is yo' last coach. If there are any mo' regrettable incidents like that te'minating the career of the lamented Malachi Hodge, the active members of the Pegasus Lit'ry Society will be called upon to maintain culture, an' this will be the last crew. Coaches are too rare to be. wasted." . The eight faces set in various forms of scowl. One voice said: "Yo' cain't keep us here. We-all are individuals." Another voice blanketed it: "Maybe he oughta just git us sta'ted and then jump overboard." Finch noticed that the words came from an oarsman who held a leash in his hand, and the other end of which was connected with a cat of the alley variety.
Finch said: "I'm afraid it wouldn't work, boys. A cox tried it at the Henley regatta, back about 1870, but they disqualified the crew. What's the trouble between you and coaches? Maybe we can settle this in the beginning."
"They git bossy and then they catch pneumony, water in the lungs, ha, ha," said one of the crew, with a snicker that Finch found peculiarly unpleasant. .
"Napoleon means the last one was drownded," explained the shaven poll. "T'were Ozzie Rhett done it." The speaker hiccupped in a manner suggestive of a magnificent hangover and jerked a somewhat unsteady thumb toward the burliest of his companions.
"Aw shucks," protested Rhett, "Cain't no one roun' here take a joke? 'Twarn't nothin' he done; I jest didn't know he couldn't swim till he^ was plumb drownded, an' then I was laughin' so hard at the way them eyes of his'n popped out, I couldn't do nothin'."
The Colonel cleared his throat, which Finch accepted as a signal to do a little cracking down. "Look here," he said, "where I come from, we have some good crews, but it's because all the oarsmen agree that the job of a sweep-swinger is to have a strong back and a weak mind. I don't care what you think, as long as you do your thinking outside the boat, and anyone who doesn't feel that way on this crew will be off it. Where are the alternates?"
Said Oswald Rhett through pouting lips: "Hain't none. We had two-three, but they done quit, like they had a puffict right to do, when they couldn't be reg'lars."
"Well, suh," said the Colonel. "I must return to the restless cares of business, and leave you to frolic. I pe'ceive I may depend upon you to lead these splendid boys in the spirit of harmony which will guarantee their victory over the St. Louis Rotarians, who are nothing but common blacklegs, suh, nothing but common blacklegs."
He saluted with his cane and was off, leaving Finch to face the problem of getting this unprepossessing eight to work together.
"All right," he said, "suppose we try it out. I don't know how you've been boated, but will you, Rhett, take stroke. You—what's your name? Pritchard? Will you take the bow oar?"
Rhett's pout gave way to a grin of satisfied vanity, but Pritchard interrupted with a firm: "No, suh."
"What do you mean, no sir?" demanded Finch.
"Either I have no talent at all, or a very special talent for rowing stroke. I insist upon rowing stroke."
"It isn't a matter of talent, but of physical equipment, and—"
He was talking to air. Pritchard had elevated a Roman nose to the extreme limit and was stalking away in a slow, exasperating goose-step, but with his ear cocked to hear a recall.
"Good ol' Pritch," commented the oarsman with the hangover in a low voice: "Count on him to do jest the opposite what anyone tells him."
Finch gazed at the retreating figure a bare second. "Yes, I guess you're right," he said, in a tone intended to carry. "A man who has pulled stroke can't possibly learn to do anything with a bow oar in less than six months."
Pritchard paused with one foot lifted, then spun round and came back at a trot. "What's that you said?" he snapped. "Why dad gum it, I kin row any position in the boat, and I'd like to see any damyank coach stop me!"
He bounced to the edge of the dock and the shell was launched, but as they began to board, Finch cried sharply: "Number Five! That's no way to board! Use both hands!"
"I don't got no number," protested the oarsman. "I got a good name, an' it's Roderick MacWhorter Hennessey, an' I gotta have one hand for Magnolia.
"Magnolia?"
"Of co'se. That's my lucky cat. I cain't leave her. Las' rime I did, my wife run away with a bus-driver from Knoxville. No Magnolia, no me."
Strong back and weak mind, all right. "Okay," said Finch, reflecting that this was what you got for casting in your lot with a group of self-starting individualists, and hoping that the damned feline would jump overboard.
But once in the boat, Magnolia turned out to be the most cooperative member of the crew; squatted between her owner's ankles just short of the travel of the roller-seat, and did not even lick herself when splashed by an occasional drop. The others were not so easy. Pritchard started the trouble—of course—by trying to row completely out of phase with the rest and Finch's orders, which naturally resulted in a tangle of oars. He was brought to some degree of cooperation by telling him to row as he pleased, but by that rime the shaven-head with the hangover was involved in a violent argument with Number Six over who had splashed whom. The shell drifted while Finch tried to pacify them; picked up and drifted again. It was not until he was visited with the inspiration of telling them about the M.I.T. boat that was mistaken for Washington by the officials at Poughkeepsie that he got them together again. That touched him off on another inspiration in view of the fact that normal coaching rules didn't hold here, so he gave them the Eaton boat song, and at the close of the practice period they came into the dock with a fair appearance of unison, puffing as they tried to put their backs into simultaneously with: