CHAPTER XXIIION THE RAMPAGE
Baseball Joe’s mates crowded around him and patted and thumped him until he was sore.
“Let up, boys,” he laughingly protested. “You’ll make a cripple of me if you keep on.”
As for McRae and Robbie, their relief and delight were beyond words.
“Wrigglin’ snakes!” ejaculated Robbie. “Such pitching! Such batting! Joe, old boy, I thought I was going to die of heart failure!”
“You won the game almost alone, Joe,” declared McRae as he wrung his hand. “I never saw anything like it. They’ll be barring you from the league if you pitch many games like that. They’ll figure that no other team has a chance.”
Elwood himself, although a hard loser, was a good sport, and came over to extend his congratulations.
“I’m as sore as a boil at losing the game, Matson,” he said. “But I want to say that I’vebeen in the game as player and manager for twenty-five years, and I don’t think I ever saw such magnificent work. No team in the league could have beaten you to-day.”
Jim Barclay was in the seventh heaven of delight. For weeks past his heart had been as heavy as lead at Joe’s unexplainable slump. Now it was as light as thistledown.
“You were the old master for fair to-day, Joe,” he said exultingly, as after the game he and his chum made their way to their hotel. “They couldn’t touch you, couldn’t come within a mile of you. And how you whaled the ball!”
“Well,” laughed Joe, “as Reggie said, one swallow doesn’t make a drink, but I hope that this is a good omen for the rest of the trip. But, do you know, Jim, I have the feeling that if this game had been played on the Polo Grounds I’d have lost it?”
“Nonsense!” protested Jim. “What puts such an idea as that in your head? Why should you play better on the Pirates’ field than on your own?”
“Does seem rather foolish, doesn’t it?” admitted Joe. “But I’ve had an odd feeling that a jinx was hovering over me in New York. I’ve felt that way for weeks past. That old arm of mine wouldn’t behave. I lost games that I ought to have won, and even when I did get by, it waslargely a matter of luck and the poor playing of the other fellows. You know that as well as I do.”
“I knew that you weren’t yourself,” said Jim. “But I just put it down to overwork.”
“It was more than that,” asserted Joe. “I’ve worked just as hard in other years and my arm has never gone back on me. This time, though, the old wing just went on strike. No apparent reason for it. It just quit.”
“Well, it came back gloriously to-day,” said Jim, with infinite relief.
“I had a hunch it would when I was warming up, and that’s the reason I asked McRae to let me pitch to-day. It’s been feeling more and more like itself ever since I left New York. By and by, if this keeps on, they’ll be saying that I’m all right on the road, but no good at home.”
“No danger of that,” asserted Jim. “Now that your arm’s come back, all grounds will look alike to you.”
The sudden comeback of Joe, apart from his own achievements in the box and on the field, put new life into the Giant team. The pall of depression that had been resting on them was swept away as in a moment. The real class of the team came to the front.
For the rest of that western trip they were like a team of runaway horses that could not bestopped. The other members of the pitching staff took on a new lease of life. Everybody was on the rampage.
When they had come into Pittsburgh they would have been glad enough to get an even break. As a matter of fact, they swept the whole four games into their bat bags and moved on to Cincinnati with the intent of giving the same medicine to the Reds. This they did not quite succeed in doing, as Bradley faltered in one of the games, but they took the other three by a substantial margin.
With seven out of eight safely stowed away, they tackled the Cubs in their lair. Here they met with their stiffest resistance. Axander, pitching against Markwith, nosed through with one victory. The Giants took the next two and would probably have grabbed a third if it had not been stopped by rain at a time that the Giants were in the lead.
On that rainy day the Giants got a laugh out of the game even if they did not register a victory. Four innings had been played and the Giants were two runs to the good. The rain threatened to come down hard every minute, and the Chicagos were doing everything in their power to delay the game so that it might end before the necessary five innings had been played that would have permitted it to be called a game.
But the umpire was obdurate, and even when a drizzle set in kept the game going. Then a diversion was caused by the appearance of one of the Chicago substitutes, “Dummy Masterson,” so called because he was deaf and dumb, who emerged from under the grandstand in raincoat and rubber boots in which he pretended to be wading about in derision of the umpire who was at the plate.
A roar of laughter went up from the crowd and the umpire flushed angrily at this mockery of his decision to go ahead with the game. He wrathfully waved Masterson off the field.
“Dummy” went slowly, but as he did so he “talked” vehemently with his companions on the bench, who were doubled up with laughter at the opinion of the umpire he was expressing. From their association with him they had learned enough about the sign language to understand it readily, while Masterson felt safe, as far as the umpire himself was concerned.
What was Masterson’s consternation, however, when suddenly the umpire’s hands went up and his fingers also began to work.
“I’m a robber, am I?” his fingers said. “I’ve got mud in my eyes, have I? All my head is fit for is to hang a cap on, is it? That’ll cost you twenty-five, Masterson, and if you don’t get off the field in a hurry I’ll make it fifty.”
The discomfited “Dummy” wilted and vanished, and the laugh was with the umpire, who, as it happened, had a brother-in-law who was deaf and dumb and from whom he had learned the sign language.
But the incident had been effective as far as delaying the game was concerned, and before it again got fairly under way the rain came down in torrents and the Giants were cheated out of another probable victory.
With only two losses out of eleven games they moved on to St. Louis.
There, what they did to the Cardinals was, as Jim expressed it, a sin and a shame. They wanted those games and they took them, all four of them, winding up in a blaze of glory the most successful trip that any Giant team had made for years.
“Oh, you pennant, come to papa!” sang out Larry Barrett, as the hilarious crowd swung aboard the train and started on the long journey home.