The Gymnasium
Dr. Naismith directed the boys to join hands and close their eyes. “Press the mark,” he said from the center of the human laurel. “For the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
Not a boy stirred.
“Anyone?” Dr. Naismith said.
An answer came not.
“Philippians!” he shouted. “Chapter three, verse fourteen!”
Grover Wright, tapped to be “center-man” for the white pinafores, attributed Dr. Naismith’s irascibility this winter’s morning to the fresh snowfall, as though only a fervency of bile could shatter the ice that had rimed his mentor’s heart in the night.
Merely fourteen, Grover was already the tallest of the Incorrigibles, and though day by day he had not yet noticed the effects of the nightly body-lengthening exercises Dr. Naismith forced upon him and him alone, his flight on the opening jump-for-possession seemed to put him upon the leather orb even as Richard McKenna, his opponent for the blue side, had scarcely left the ground. The volley reached his brother Zacharias, who was promptly bowled over by Lawrence Foote, Dr. Naismith’s whistle bursting through the gymnasium air. “ ’Tis a foul,” the doctor called. “The game isn’t rugby, gentlemen.”
“Yes, for we’re no longer allowed to play rugby,” said Grover, as softly as prayer.
“Wright the elder,” said Dr. Naismith. “Have you a dispute with the ruling?”
To which Grover said naught.
“Then I’ll abide no cheek,” said Dr. Naismith. He turned to Lawrence Foote, who remained astride prone Zacharias. “Fair play, boys,” he commanded.
“I was just telling Wright the younger that no one might enter the strong man’s house without first binding him,” Lawrence Foote said.
“Very good, Foote, but you must learn another verse one of these days,” said Dr. Naismith.
When Zacharias made to rise, Lawrence Foote shoved the smaller boy in the chest, adding, “Mark, chapter three, verse twenty-seven.”
The first goal of Dr. Naismith’s new sport was marked by Yukio Ishikawa on a panicked toss of great length, the ball arching to the rafters and striking the inner edge of the mounted peach basket before caroming high to fortuitously land with a soft thump inside the wicker. Yukio was a short, fat boy, and it was rumored within the dormitory that his lush body was a devil’s trick, cloaking a fugitive soul that in the night roamed the halls, causing misfortune to any International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School student luckless enough to espy its diaphanous form. He had been placed among the Incorrigibles after spitting on the gymnasium floor to show his distaste for Dr. Naismith’s extensive calisthenics regimen.
“Very fine, Mr. Ishikawa,” Dr. Naismith said, removing a ladder from beneath the bleachers to retrieve the ball. “A wondrous goal, to glorify both your fellow blue pinafores and the spirit of God within ye.”
The game continued, with few goals and many fouls, but the boys quickly agreed that it was, if not a jolly pastime, at least more agreeable than the rope ascensions, corpse’s sprints, and leaping Dutchmen normally mandated them in poor weather. During the winter months, other sections of boys were allowed to play floor polo or a muted form of rugby indoors, but for the Incorrigibles, known to crack each other’s skulls even in chapel, a bare minimum of contact was a prerequisite to any competition meant to develop their young bodies according to the tenets of Muscular Christianity.
At the half-time, Grover sat upon the bleachers, his tendons strung taut as zither strings, and presently his brother joined him. The snow outside the large gymnasium windows continued to fall and Zacharias’s face was sickly, coated in the morning’s cold light.
“That befouled oaf,” Zacharias said, breathless. “I shall show him.”
“Foote?” said Grover. “You likely shan’t. He outweighs you by four stone if an ounce.”
“I swear an oath this day,” said Zacharias.
“Need I remind you that with one more demerit, you shall be sent home? If Father will even accept you through the doors.”
“’Bold speech,” replied Zacharias, “for one risking the same whenever he slips down the night trellis to tryst with the girls of St. Benedict’s.”
“Why do you not take your revenge on Yukio instead,” said Grover. “Pay him back for his deviousness in mess the supper ere.”
“To take them where you do,” Zacharias continued, unlistening. “To rut in a ditch.”
“Do not grow cross with me in Foote’s stead,” said Grover. “Besides, have you a better option?”
“The hollow tree to which I take the objects of my affection,” his brother said, his eyes still upon Lawrence Foote, “is called Zacharias’s Ardor.”
As Zacharias stood up, implacable, the gymnasium filled with a screech of glass and cold air’s bluster. A window had broken, crystalline shards showering to the floor, followed by a small tempest of driven snow, a cloud that turned the indoor air to sky. A black form flopped about beneath, amidst a growing puddle of melt. The boys stood as one and began to push towards the site of the disaster, but as Dr. Naismith cautioned them back, their unified organism returned to rest. The storm stretched across the gymnasium ceiling, the wind’s rumble swallowing the tapping of the doctor’s soles on the oak.
Dr. Naismith bent to the floor to examine the culprit, then took it into his hands.
“What is it, sir?” one of the boys called.
“A crow,” replied Dr. Naismith, his lapels dappled with snow. He held the bird out so that all the boys might gaze upon it. “And black as night it is.” The bird appeared to be struggling against its possessor. Blood flowed into the doctor’s cuff. “We shan’t continue the game, for the work of this insipid fowl.” He tightened his grip.
The crow opened its beak, respiring desperately, and Grover fancied it turned its cochineal eyes on him ere its quickness drained, upon which time Dr. Naismith dropped the carcass to the floor. It landed with a sickening thunk, as though each feather were a cord of wood, and overhead, the eldritch indoor squall ran dry.
“Mr. Foote, Mr. McKenna,” Dr. Naismith said. “Fetch a broom. Mr. Ishikawa, a towel, if you please.”
The chosen boys set out upon their tasks, leaving the remaining children in the bleachers to chatter upon the abrupt end of the day’s exercise and what significance it might hold.
Dr. Naismith hoisted himself upon the ladder, towards the shattered pane. He ran his hand along the frame’s border, knocking out the leftover jags. Avoiding the sight of his tutor, Grover took the ball into his hands and walked towards the pile of glass and melt, soiled pink by the blood of the bird. He wound up and threw true (far truer than he had at any point in the Basket-ball match), striking Lawrence Foote square between the shoulder blades, sending him sprawling over his broom into the crooked pool.
“The Wright family’s vengeance be done!” cried Grover.
While the incorrigible boys agreed that it had been a good turn, and Lawrence lost quite a bit of respect that morning, Grover saw his brother’s face grow blank as the ball struck, his visage that of one trying very hard to remember a dream.
The Heightener
“The human body is elastic,” Dr. Naismith explained yet again, giving the Heightener’s wheel another quarter turn, and the pressure abated in Grover’s hamstrings but redoubled in his groin. He lay on a slant, feet above his head, ankles looped inside an ell of ship’s hawser. “Else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? And then he will spoil his house.”
Grover opened his mouth to take in air, and heard his own voice escape. “That’s the verse Lawrence Foote knows.”
“Ah,” Dr. Naismith said, adjusting the candle upon his secretary. “But Foote knows only the words as they appear in Mark. Read your Matthew, boy, where they appear with such context! The Pharisees attempted to cast out Jesus, but that generation of vipers could not. Do you know why?”
“They did not bind him?” Grover guessed.
Dr. Naismith gave the great machine’s wheel another turn. “Because Jesus was strong.”
The pain was excruciating.
On Evil
What is the nature of evil in the heart of a boy? Some instructors at the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School, poor agronomists and worse ecclesiasts, argued that evil was like to a seed, germinating in the same bodily springtime that nurtures a young soul, taking fast root for want of a disciplined gardener’s scythe. This was why the Incorrigibles were isolated: for belief that depravity might spread as rapacious as dandelion, overtaking a lea’s worth of young souls within a single loop of the Earth.
Dr. Naismith, as he had explained to Grover many times, likened evil not to seed but to spore, its growth secret as a fungus, a soul’s every trespass an undifferentiated copy in miniature of that told of in Genesis. There, in a body’s dark cells, lay the potential for all binding sin to bloom.
So should one’s respiration be mighty Aeolian gusts, one’s metabolism as precise as the clocklike firmament, one’s humors well irrigated to drown the demon that grows inside us all! Size was strength and to be strong was to be saved, and thereby one’s holiness could be gauged with scale and yardstick. Let light through one’s gaping pores, and so expose the Devil as but a mote of floating dust! It was all a matter of proportion.
The Dormitory
Sliding from his bed, Grover attempted to place his feet upon the floor as softly as possible. He smarted mightily from his daily elastic contortions and the game of Basket-ball besides. He had been awoken by a noise he assumed to be the scratching of a branch upon the dormitory window, but furtive inspection revealed a still, blue night beyond. As Nod had been walled off to him, he hung his head over the edge of his bunk to speak with his brother below.
No-body lay amid the scattered bedclothes.
The noise struck again, a ringing, as from a metal pipe hit with a wrench. It sounded from the lavatories down the hall. Grover began to press forth, fearing Yukio’s ephemeral form when he was met by an emergence from the shadows.
Zacharias acknowledged him not.
Lawrence Foote, his dressing gown shredded into a loop of rags thus binding his wrists about the commode, was discovered by Richard McKenna, the first boy to rise for morning ablutions. McKenna fetched George Townsend, who, upon seeing Lawrence’s position, reported the disgrace to Hal Featherstone, who informed Victor Oates, and soon every incorrigible boy was crowded inside the stall, mocking the fettered boy’s organ, shrunken in the chill of the unheated loo.
“ ’Tis like a baby’s,” said Townsend.
“Look not,” said Oates. “The will of the wraith might yet be present.”
“Truly, the Oriental vengeance of Ishikawa’s cunning soul is not to be trifled with,” said McKenna, breathless.
“Gentlemen,” said Yukio Ishikawa. “I was merely in my oneiric reveries, like every boy present.”
“Then there’s the proof,” said Featherstone. “Had Ishikawa not slumbered, his spirit might never have strayed from its fetid cell.”
“Unbind me,” said Lawrence Foote. “Please.”
Upon which his simpering courtesy was personated by all present, until the commotion drew Headmaster Gulick, who cleared the passel of chirping youths from his path. Seeing Lawrence Foote’s compromised state, he sent for Dr. Naismith, and soon the two men stood over the boy as the others looked on.
“Foote,” said Dr. Naismith, kneeling upon the tile. “Who hath wrought this desecration upon your dermic temple?”
Lawrence said naught.
“Untie the boy, James,” said Headmaster Gulick to Dr. Naismith.
As he knelt to solve the dressing gown’s knot, Dr. Naismith informed the boys that two complete games of Basket-ball, as well as a full regimen of calisthenics, would take the place of break-fast. “And so it shall remain,” said the doctor, “until the culprit of this ill act has confessed, received his just punishment, and atoned.”
The Gymnasium
Ere the jump-for-possession of the morning’s opening Basket-ball match, the Incorrigibles were assigned twice as many leaping Dutchmen as was commonplace, to the dismay of all. Yukio Ishikawa bore foul stares and fouler words at his back. The storm outside had redoubled in the night, and the cold pouring through the unmended window in the gymnasium provided still-rigid limbs no succor.
Between exertions, Grover whispered to his brother, “I had the matter settled with Foote, now ’tis begun again, and fiercer.”
Zacharias shrugged. “Might not an honest grocer tare his scales against his clientele’s future theft?”
“Brothers Wright!” Dr. Naismith called. “Center floor.”
Upon the blowing of Dr. Naismith’s whistle, Grover found himself effortlessly heavenward, the ball ascending as slowly as the moon and he rose upon it as if drawn by its gravity, a mark of God for the blessed. Flailing his hands upwards, he saw his bonsai fingertips tiny with the miniaturization of perspective.
Around him blue pinafores flowed like an underwater ecology, yet he swam effortlessly through. Establishing himself below the peach basket, he received a pass and scored the game’s first goal by switching the ball to his left hand, depositing it in the duck with a nifty flip of the wrist. The first three possessions of the game repeated in much the same fashion. As Grover made his way back to center-court, Dr. Naismith applauded.
“He’s simply making a home by the mark,” protested Yukio Ishikawa. “A rule against which would make the contest more sporting.”
As Grover looked back towards the goal, the shadows of his last movements seemed to remain fossilized upon the air, though the body that cast them had gone.
Dr. Naismith shook his head. “When faced with an opponent with dimensional superiority, you must unify your strength. Be unto the painted area about the goal as the disciples to the word of God.”
Thus, in the next possession, the smaller boys in blue slapped at Grover fiercely when he received the ball, forcing him to return a pass to Hal Featherstone, who tensed for a long overhand try that fell far short of the mark, the ball bouncing out-of-bounds. The swarm about Grover dissipated, save for the jostling of Lawrence Foote.
“Know this,” Lawrence Foote said. “I will not rest ’til I am avenged.” With that, he deposited his elbow into Grover’s solar plexus. Grover doubled over to the ground. It was a fair distance down.
“Wright,” Dr. Naismith said. “Have you been taken ill?” He stood over his charge, towering above Grover, his fearsome gargoyle’s face a mask of leering pleasure.
Grover gathered his breath and placed his legs beneath him. “No, sir,” he croaked. “I believe I have been stricken by hunger.”
“Rise, child,” said Dr. Naismith. “And know that your fast would be sooner broken with the revelation of the night’s malefactor.”
Grover looked about the gymnasium at his tired fellows, at Yukio Ishikawa, at the face of his brother: whether bearing fear or anger, he could not tell which.
He stood. “ ’Twas I, Dr. Naismith.” The words were fairly coughed. “I bound Foote.”
Headmaster Gulick’s Office
The train to Worcester passed through Springfield twice per day, but the stable’s horses were too valuable to risk in the tempest outside, even in the event that the senior Mr. Wright, himself a fearsome disciplinarian, funded his eldest son’s ticket home by wire. A big-toothed drudge named Rasmussen (himself two mere years out of the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School’s regimental colors, now working as Headmaster Gulick’s secretary) grinned as the ticker sang. “That’ll be the paterfamilias now, eh?” he said to Grover.
Headmaster Gulick would not look Grover in the eye when he emerged from his office. Dr. Naismith sat behind the door, his hands folded in his lap.
“What time is the train scheduled to arrive, sir?” asked Grover.
The headmaster shook his head. “Your father refused to provide you a ticket,” he said. “I am sorry, Wright.”
“And how am I to return home?” said Grover. He had still not eaten to-day.
Dr. Naismith regarded him through his pince-nez. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, boy,” he said.
“But I believe the elastic exercises are performing their purpose,” pleaded Grover. “And I must continue or I shan’t stop growing. Is that not your Heightener’s essential principle, Doctor?”
“If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed,” said Dr. Naismith, fairly whispering, “ye might say unto the sycamine tree, ‘Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.”
“Have mercy on me, Doctor,” said Grover.
“Rasmussen will show you out,” said Headmaster Gulick.
The beaver-faced functionary opened the door, allowing the dead season to fall across the threshold, and its cold weight wrapped Grover like a drunkard desperate for purchase against vertiginous blood.
“Wright,” Dr. Naismith called behind him.
Grover turned back to his mentor.
“If you please, the blanket.”
Winter
Though he had found his way to St. Benedict’s Finishing School on the most moonless of nights, often with a detour to the distilleries of Springfield’s Celtictown besides, Grover’s path soon became tangled. When he turned to orient himself with the way behind, the grey walls of the International Training School had vanished, erased as yester-day’s lesson from slate in the covering whiteness wrought of winter. He plunged forward. In places the drifts reached to his knees. The cold was bitter and Grover soon could not feel his hands.
It was true that the many and varied crimes of adolescence—from slovenliness to uncleanliness of thought and body—marked him. But to be cast into a state of abomination for the crime of filial love—for refuting Cain himself!—gave him the impression that the cold woods were a mirror world, one in which prayer was sin, law was malfeasance. The perpetual vengeance of this valley of death was reaped not through searing fire or sempiternal thirst but with slashes of decelerating cold. This was how it was that a sinner might never die, but only come ever closer to the goal—half again as near, half again again, and again, an immortal crawl as one’s unsaved molecules slowed their cosmic dance, a hell that turned all to ice.
Moving his legs without intention, he came upon a copse which cut the wind, if not the cold. He drove deeper into the wood, gathering the likeliest sticks and twigs in hopes that he might come upon a place dry enough to light a fire. The sun could not burn the clouds nor could its light penetrate the tangle of branches over-head, and in dim shadow he approached a sizable oak, ancient, and hollow about the base. Drawn as a piglet to its sow-mother’s dugs, Grover crawled inside the shell and let the wood envelop him, the warm smell of the aged bark soothing the ache beneath his woolen jersey as gently as a hot mug of emollient. A hollow tree. A pleasure palace to rival any room of Kublai Khan’s on this cold night. This growth, so charged with relieving warmth, with life, despite being a site of abominable concupiscence, could be no other but Zacharias’s Ardor.
His brother’s words sang against the tight walls of the tree—might not an honest grocer tare his scales against his clientele’s future theft? Had perchance the Lord more perfidy in his shop than reckoned in the good Dr. Naismith’s thewy dreams?
From within the oak he hung his arms outside to stack his bundle, and the spark he struck from his flint jumped true. The twigs caught from the tinder with nigh none of his vaporous breath. But though exhaustion gripped him, and warm as he soon was, Grover’s bitter hunger would not let him sleep. As he watched the shadows for the rustle of game, he gathered those stones within his reach that might suit as missiles. One such perfect sphere lay just beyond his fingertips, but as he warmed he grew wary of moving even an inch beyond the borders of his brother’s tree.
At length, however, his shoulders began to hurt, and upon attempting to shift his weight, he found himself wedged tightly inside the tree. Nonetheless his hand now lay atop the spherical stone easily. The flames at Grover’s feet looked very small indeed.
He woke. With night’s creep, shadows dampened the copse and now a foul and silent wind blew, one redolent of the sourest of the oyster-shell-floored alehouses in Boston. Upon a branch opposite Grover landed a crow, black but for the snow dusting its wings and its eyes, as rubedo-charged as those of the bird that had crashed through the gymnasium window. The same bird, thought Grover, its avian soul mocking the grip of Dr. Naismith.
He attempted to flick his perfect stone at the creature, but his arm bound by the squeezing wood, the missile barely rose above the ground, rolling into the shrubs opposite, and the bird took flight, cawing into the open sky above. Perhaps the first bird’s brother, scoffing upon Grover’s short-sighted vengeance?
The bordering bushes continued to rustle, far beyond what the disturbance of the tossed stone might merit, and presently a mottled grey-and-white wolf emerged, bearing the same red eyes as the hell-bird. They never left the boy’s face as the feral hound snuffled at Grover’s distant feet. Then the beast’s jowls drew back, exposing its gums, and it reared and sank its yellow incisors through the shoe-leather of Grover’s boot, ripping off his toes with a swift pull of its muscled neck, blood soaking the fur upon the animal’s breast. Grover flicked his other foot forward in pain and caught the wolf about the throat, finding it pinned to the tree opposite, and with a twist of his ankle, shattered the creature’s cervical vertebrae. It emitted a plaintive yelp and fell limply to the snow.
A cracking as fierce as a lake’s springtime melt broke through the forest. It was in him and all around him and when it subsided Grover found his shoulders free. At his feet were the remains of Zacharias’s Ardor, the oak splinters, the type used on the parquet of the gymnasium floor, scarcely bigger than chipped potatoes. No matter his errors in doctrine, in this Dr. Naismith was proved correct—Grover was large and so he was strong, and he was strong and so he was saved.
When he straightened, his head broke the tree line, and visible were the shapes of the International Young Men’s Christian Academy Training School, with St. Benedict’s beyond. Past the southern horizon, plumes of smoke rose from the chimneys of factories and steam-engines of Springfield.
Grover bent and lifted the lupine cadaver between two fingers and placed it in the palm of his hand, then into his mouth. It was gamy with a tinge of sulfur, not unlike the German cheeses the boys received at Yule-tide. As he chewed, a flash illum’d the shivers at his feet, and stooping, Grover found a shard of metal amidst the flotsam. Its shape was that of a wolf’s bone, but it was cold to the touch and so clear it was scarcely visible in the shadow of his palm. Grover swallowed, then took the osseous blade between his fingertips and passed it over the downy hairs on his cheek. As if finely honed by an itinerant scissors-man, the razor sheared three hairs and tumbled a drop of blood after them, pitting the snow below. A corresponding drop of melt followed from the bone’s stiletto-end, bursting apart as it fell.
His stomach bared its teeth. His hunger was not yet sated.
Mystery in a Workman’s Death – Mr. Dry Found Eviscerated – Coroner to Decide
From the Pages of the Springfield Sentinel, 13 December, 1891
Whether the death of Alvin W. Dry of 72 Fremont Street shall be called natural or unnatural is a question to be decided by the coroner. News reached here that the body of Dry, formerly of West Boylston, was found in an alley not 500 feet from the gates of the Sullivan Munitions Works, his place of employ. A single clean slice had loosed his viscerae like those of a condemned hart, the man’s giblets bearing scavenger’s marks. The general belief is that the man died from heart disease and dropsy; that he fell and struck his head, his body ravaged postmortem by fox or raccoon. Yet several of Mr. Dry’s fellows have reported to policemen at Mill Street Station that upon taking their break-fast comfort at the pub near to the factory gates, cries were heard of “Wha’d’ye fancy yer doin’, lad?” and “Oi, me dinner,” from the alley where Dry’s body was found. It should be noted that Dry’s meal-pail was found near the body, unlocked and its mess pilfered. Coroner’s Physician Weston is expected to announce his opinion on the autopsy results later to-day.
The Nativity Preparatory School of Lowell, 1892
Lawrence Foote delivered a rabbit punch to the neck of the defender, whose momentum carried him into the bars, the referee’s whistle remaining dutifully silent. To maintain continuous play, metal cages were now often erected about the new Basket-ball “courts,” and rivals seized this development to render verdicts about the bounds of those cages with cunning elbows and subtle blows. Zacharias Wright, captain of the champion Springfield Boys Traveling Basket-ball Team, now grown into the tallest and most adept “cager” in the state, set for the try.
Not one year after its invention, the game had squirmed from Dr. Naismith’s grip, growing—as if reflecting the hearts of the boys who played it—more akin to the rugby matches forbidden his charges. Its rules had mutated like Galapagos birds, and local variations became numerous; here in Lowell, a try from distance was worth more than one close to the goal, while one nimble player for the Dennis Mohawks had developed a means of running while in possession of the ball, throwing continuous bounces to himself as if his passes were made within a team of one. The motion looked, one wag put it, like drool falling from the jowls of a St. Bernard.
And young Zacharias Wright, said to navigate thickets of clawing opponents like a wraith slipping through branches in the blue of a moonless night, and for whom even tries like that now leaving his fingertips (from without the ambit of discretion and so worth three points on Lowell’s home floor) dropped into the basket with preternatural frequency, was thought to be rewriting the commandments of the doctor’s game through little more apparent than skill and size.
As the ball reached the height of its arc, neither ascending nor descending, he felt it take on a familiar and palpable aesthesia, and Zacharias was possessed with the sensation that time had stopped too, as though he could reach up and pluck the orb from its airy shelf and deposit it in the goal.
This is the trick that could be neither taught nor practiced: measurement creates its own milieu. To deposit a ball into a peach basket, what would be the purpose lest one counted it, calculated it, placed it on a clock, into a census? In the coming century of quantification, acts which could not be tallied would mark one as either a criminal or as some ancient and regressive god. Yes, man could indeed fly as a bird, but to defy gravity was to become a ghost, in body or in soul.
In his senescence, Lawrence Foote would confess to youthful visions. On dire stretches of what is now the Massachusetts Turnpike, he was caught in sudden ice storms that railed like shattered bones and then were gone, else he heard young girls’ keens from the surrounding woods in which the stars vanished. These were stretches of road later commonly thought to be haunted, on which delinquents (including Foote’s very descendants) and their paramours parked automobiles and waited for the arrival of a hungry boy too tall to see, to hear sonorous trudges crunching wet snow like rock-sugar, for bloody footprints that melted away in the heat of being beheld.
These nightmares made Foote taciturn and timid in street clothes and gave rise to concentrated fury in Dr. Naismith’s game. And in both classroom and upon the Basket-ball court, Lawrence Foote scraped to Zacharias Wright like a disciple, or a servant.
The ball began its descent. To Zacharias, the Lowell boys too were as slowed to a crawl, locks of their oiled hair appearing to wave gently from their scalps like strands of submerged pondweed.
The bone-blade, the peach basket, the cold of winter. All these things were one, and they were all the body of Grover Wright and all the blood that had run from it. And so had his brother become the bitter air through which Zacharias floated, that of vengeance and sacrifice, immeasurable and uncertain. This was what Zacharias could not escape: however many hours he logged on Dr. Naismith’s Heightener, however large he was stretched, no light would fill him.
Wright the Younger turned from the goal, anticipating the approbation of the assembled spectators, knowing his shot was guided to its mark. 
