Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/691

inch alongside the yellow ribbon, stayed there. The shouts grew deafening. They roared in his ears like all the thunders of the universe let loose. The yellow badge was falling hehind—he knew it by that thunder.

“Come on, Dud! Come on, boy! Come on!”

Three seconds later, he broke the tape half a yard ahead of Connolly, and fell into the arms of his comrades, the winner of the day for the Blues.

“Did you do it?” cried Chrystie, when they got to her, half a dozen of them running breathless behind the excited Biffles, She was sitting up gamely on the grass. If she had fainted away a little in the meantime and come to again, all by herself, that was nobody's business but hers. “Was it in time?” she cried.

“In time!” shouted the delirious captain, while Dudley dropped down beside his sister, “You bet it was! But—”

“Then it ’s all right,” sighed Chrystie, settling softly to one side, like the foundering little craft she was. “I owe the automobile boy a dollar, Dud,—the telegram from Dad is in my pocket—and I think—1 have broken—my arm!”

Every time Dudley puts the silver cup, which was presented to him that afternoon, on Chrystie’s mantel, Chrystie immediately puts it back again among Dudley's other trophies; but she cannot prevent Dudley and all the rest of the household, egged on by the doctor, who began it when he was mending her arm, from alluding to that particular race, as it will doubtless go down in the annals of the Evans family, as “Chrystie’s Event.”

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“The Tyranny of Tears.”
Bob (disgusted): “This is no place for me!”

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