The Scranton High Chums on the Cinder Path

In the event that you're looking for something to read while waiting for the re-release of Once A Runner, there's always Donald Ferguson's The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path (or The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry). This was one of Ferguson's series of four sports-related books for boys:

The Chums of Scranton High (or Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight)
The Chums of Scranton High Out For The Pennant (or In The Three Town League)
The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path (or The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry)
The Chums of Scranton High At Ice Hockey

Apparently by the fourth book Ferguson had run out of sub-titles, and after that he had run out of sports. These were all published in a flurry around 1919, or about the same time as the Spanish Influenza and the start of Prohibition.

The athletic aspect of Cinder Path involves the "chums" getting ready for a "fifteen-mile Marathon race." Ferguson notes that this is "an unusually long distance for boys to run, by the way, and hardly advisable under ordinary conditions." For fictional characters, though, there is no danger of injury or over-training, so it's okay. Apparently the race has an open course with checkpoints, and the "chums" are out looking for shortcuts between the checkpoints when they stumble into The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry. Think Scooby Doo in running spikes. Once the mystery is cleared up, though, it's time for the climactic race in which the "chums" triumph for dear old Scranton High.

Track & field fiction is seldom of high literary quality, and Cinder Path is no exception. To be generous, the language is, um, quaint--which is about what you'd expect for a boys' book from the early twentieth century. The trouble is, you want track & field fiction to at least get the track & field right, and Cinder Path doesn't. I'll forgive calling a mere fifteen miles a Marathon, because that did happen back then (and still does). But "cinder path" usually means a track, not a cross-country course. And having an interscholastic race over that distance just isn't credible, especially for a group of "chums" who spend more time chasing ghosts than training. Ferguson obviously created the race not because it was something that high school runners would typically compete in, but just so that he could get the "chums" into the countryside where they would run into the Haunted Quarry.

Aside from the perverse pleasure of discovering one of the rotten tomatoes of running literature, Cinder Path has one other redeeming quality--it is absolutely free. All of the Scranton High chums' adventures are in the public domain now, and Project Gutenberg has digitized each volume. Copies are all over the web, like this one here:

Internet Archive's copy of The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path
http://www.archive.org/stream/thechumsofscrant13251gut/13251.txt

There are also a variety of paperback reprint editions available, no doubt churned out by folks who used the Project Gutenberg files for their typesetting. But stick with the electronic version. Enough trees have already died for the Scranton High chums.