Play the Game! | Page 5

last
of his negro servitors and the last of his cellar and his young family into
it and died. Since that day Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny
creatures, liked and sighed over, and the house was shabby now,
cracked and peeling for the want of paint, the walks grass-grown, the
lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains at the dim windows. There were
only three bottles of the historic cellar left now, precious, cob-webbed;
there was only one of the blacks, an ancient, crabbed crone of the
second generation, with a witch's hand at cookery and a witch's temper.
And there were only James King III and James King IV, his son,
Honor's Jimsy, left of the line in the old home. The negress fed and
mended them; an infrequent Japanese came in to make futile efforts on
house and garden.
The neighbors said, "How do you do, Mr. King? Like summer, really,
isn't it?" and looked hastily away. One never could be sure of finding
him quite himself. Even if he walked quite steadily he might not be
able to talk quite steadily, but he was always a King, always sure of his
manner, be he ever so unsure of his feet or his tongue. He had been
worse since his wife died, when the boy was still a toddler. She was a
slim, sandy-haired Scotch girl with steady eyes and a prominent chin,
who had married him to reform him, and the neighbors were beginning
to think she was in a fair way to compass it when she died. No one had
ever been able to pity Jeanie King; she had been as proud as the pale
lady who came with the first "Wild King" from Virginia. There was
that about the Kings; it had to be granted that their women always stuck;
they must have had compensating traits and graces. No King wife ever

gave up or deserted save by death, and no King wife ever wept on a
neighbor's shoulder.
And now they had all wandered back to Virginia or up to Alaska or
down to Mexico, and there was not an uncle or cousin of his tribe left
in Los Angeles for Jimsy King; only his bad, beloved father, coming
home at noon in rumpled evening dress, but wearing it better and more
handily, for all that, than any other man on the block.
It was agreed that there was no chance for Jimsy to escape the heritage
of his blood. People were kind about it, but very firm. "If his mother
had lived he might have had a chance, the poor boy," Mrs. Lorimer
would sigh, "but with that father, and that home life, and that
example----"
"My dear," said Stephen Lorimer, "can't you see what you are doing?
By you I mean the neighborhood. You are holding his heredity up like a
hoop for him to jump through!"
Honor's stepfather held that there might be a generous share of the
firm-chinned Scotch mother in Jimsy. Certainly it was a fighting
chance; he was living in a day of less warmth and color than his father
and his forbears; there were more outlets for his interest and his energy.
His father, for instance, had not played football. Jimsy had played as
soon as he could walk alone--football, baseball, basketball, handball,
water polo; life was a hard and tingling game to him. "It's an even
chance," said Stephen Lorimer, "and if Honor's palling with him can
swing it, can we square it with ourselves to take her away from him?"
He carried his point, as usual, and the boy and the girl started in at Los
Angeles High on the same day. Honor decided on the subjects which
Jimsy could most safely take--the things he was strongest in, the weak
subjects in which she was strong. There was an inexorable rule about
being signed up by every teacher for satisfactory work on Friday
afternoon before a Saturday football game; it was as a law of the Medes
and Persians; even the teachers who adored him most needs must abide
by it. There was no cajoling any of them; even the pretty, ridiculously
young thing who taught Spanish maintained a Gibraltar-like firmness.

"You'll simply have to study, Jimsy, that's all," said Honor.
"Study, yes, but that's not learning, Skipper!" (She had been that ever
since her first entirely seaworthy summer at Catalina.) "I can study, if I
have to, but that's not saying I'll get anything into my sconce! I'm pretty
slow in the head!"
"I know you are," said Honor, sighing. "Of course, you've been so busy
with other things. Think what you've done in athletics!"
"Fast on the feet and slow in the head," he grinned. "Well, I'll die trying.
But you've got