Chapter II: It had been a glorious day

The first touch of winter was in the air, clear, crisp, and set the blood a-tingling.

"Ideal football weather," the sporting writer of the _Journal_ had called it in the early afternoon edition where, with the wisdom of his species, he had sought to forecast the game's result.

In honor of the occasion a gracious citizenry had swathed Jefferson and Woodward Avenues in bandages of maize and blue, and all day long the small boy had been as active as though it were the fourth of July rather than the fifth of November.

And now in the evening, the older portion of the citizenry withdrew, and the theatres, the lobbies of the prominent hotels, the clubs, and all the places of public meeting, were turned over, unconditionally, to youth.

A kindly disposed commissioner of police had instructed his men to be lenient.

"Boys will be boys," he said to the captain on night duty at the Central Station, as he left the office.

"But what about the _girls_?" inquired the captain with a twinkle in his own eyes that was almost youthful.

"Well--they will be, too--sometimes," the commissioner replied.

In the lobby of the Russell House, where the team was installed, the mayor of Detroit--who himself had been an undergraduate once and remembered it--addressed the throng below him, from the first broad landing of the wide marble stairway.

His rounded periods were cheered to the echo; and when he drily observed that all the policemen had been taken off duty the roof fairly lifted and guests came pouring into the corridors, their faces clearly indicating their alarm.

"You know," the mayor observed, his eyes twinkling,--"we've what they call a slow town here. Well, it rests with you boys, for this night at least, to make it fast. Moreover, it's an old town, a _very_ old town, and wherever you find an absence of paint you have my permission and the permission of the commissioner of police to redecorate. I suppose red would be the proper tint. I have had a fondness for the color ever since I was one of you--an undergrad. at old Ann Arbor----"

In the pandemonium that ensued the mayor judiciously withdrew. The crowd "rushed" the lobby, and staid old men, in town over the day, sought places of greater security on landings, behind pillars, and in corners whence might be had a view of the proceedings without, necessarily, participation.

One by one various members of the team appeared at the head of the stairway and at each appearance a welcome of ringing cheers was sounded. The director of athletics, a little man with a wiry mustache and a square chin addressed the crowd from the top step after prolonged cries of "Speech! Speech!"

The trainer, a huge man with a face like a fist, a Cockney accent, and the shoulders of an ox, shouted a few phrases above the din. Each time he uttered the word, "Michigan," which he insisted upon pronouncing "Mitch-ti-gan," he was cheered wildly.

When Adams appeared on the upper landing and hesitated there the commotion became deafening.

A section of the throng swept up to him, seized him and carried him further down where he was made to blurt a few incoherent sentences in which one caught, above the noise, a constant repetition of the words--"fellows"--"great"--"wiped 'em up"--"knew it"--"right stuff"--and others from the campus jargon, generally as unintelligible as Ute gutterals.

Then he, too, descended and became an atom of the matter below as eager to cry "Speech!" to the others when they should appear, as the mob about him now had been to demand a word from him.

It all combined to constitute a riot of triumph, a veritable debauch in the sensation of triumph--a triumph well won, and fairly; honestly accepted, and as honestly celebrated by nearly three thousand as irresponsible young spirits as ever took possession of a town.

Into the streets they poured. The police gritted their teeth and restrained themselves with an effort, the strength of which their tormentors did not dream.

Passers-by were good-naturedly jostled off the pavement by phalanxes of obstreperous lads, who swept all before them as arm in arm, eight and ten abreast, they advanced upon the city.

Money had been wagered and money had been won and there was money to spend and be spent; and they spent it. They took possession of the restaurants. In the theatres they shouted the choruses of all the songs they knew, and between acts they whistled, stamped and applauded, in that deadly unison and rhythm that has been known to bring buildings tumbling about the heads of less vehement folk.

And why all this stampede of ecstasy?

Because two minutes before the umpire's call of time, John Adams, a tall, broad, blonde giant, whom few of his worshippers really knew, had found an elliptical pig-skin and, rushing like an engine of destruction down a well turfed field, had touched it to the ground behind a pair of slim, straight poles.