Summary
In the soot-smudged glow of a Midwestern gridiron dawn, Bob Harding—laconic halfback, campus poet, and accidental moral lightning rod—receives a telegram that razors open his world: his father’s heart has quit in the night, leaving behind only the echo of unpaid debts and a widow poised to lose porch, porch swing, and pride. Returning to a town whose sidewalks seem suddenly narrower, Bob discovers that grief is the least predatory thing afoot; a cabal of chalk-striped hyenas has bamboozled his bereaved mother into signing away the family homestead for the price of a second-hand Studebaker. While Bob juggles night-shift grease-monkey gigs and dawn practice drills, the syndicate ups the ante—wager heavy on the upcoming rivalry match and sidle up to the boy with velvet ultimatums: spike the game or watch your mother’s roof become kindling. Fists fly in a pool-hall montage of shattered cue sticks and moral arithmetic, but salvation arrives in the rumpled guise of a rail-riding hobo who, in a Dickensian flourish, is revealed to be Rena Austin’s vanished patriarch—once a society architect, now a Depression ghost. He pickpockets the crooked deed, Rena unearths exculpatory ledgers, and Bob—after a bravura third-act ballet involving a locomotive, a Jenny biplane, and a skyhook worthy of Icarus—touches down on the twenty-yard line with seconds to spare, his leather helmet still flecked with cloud-dust, to hurl the winning touchdown through autumn’s copper light.
Synopsis
Bob Harding, a student in love with Rena Austin, his hometown sweetheart, is preparing to play an important football match when he receives word from home that his father has died. There he learns that his father has left nothing for college funds, and while he is trying to get a job his mother is tricked into signing an option on her property for a paltry sum. In an effort to stall off the crooks, Bob gets into a fight when they suggest he "throw" the game on which they have bet money. A tramp, who turns out to be Rena's long-lost father, steals the option from the crooks, and Rena obtains evidence that clears her father of a scheme in which he had innocently been involved. Freed by the police, Bob boards the train, is lifted from the roof of the speeding train by an airplane, and arrives at the field in time to save his team from defeat.
