This might be Horatio Juggins, or McKee, or perhaps that Belleville runner, Conway, who had looked so confident when Hugh surveyed the line of eager faces at the start.
Hugh remembered every foot of the way along that quarry road.

He had a faculty for impressing features of the surrounding landscape on his mind, so that he could recall it at pleasure, just as though he held a photograph in his hand.
Now he was drawing near the quarry itself, the loneliest and most gruesome stretch of the entire cut-off; with "Just" Smith still in the lead.

Hugh felt proud of his chum, and often chuckled as he contemplated the other's supreme delight in case a fickle fortune allowed him to come in ahead; for honors of this sort were a rare thing in the past of the Smith boy; and certainly he had never before been so close to reaping such a colossal prize as the winning of the Marathon would be reckoned.
Now Hugh glimpsed the quarry on one side of him.

How his thoughts flew backward to marshal the strange events so recently happening there, in which he and some of his comrades had had the good fortune to participate.
Just then he heard a plain groan.

It gave him a little thrill, but not because he fancied there was anything supernatural connected with the sound.