CHAPTER XXIIONE CAR AND THREE COWSThe young man looked worried. He was capless and coatless, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled to the elbows. When he saw the nine boys approaching, he stopped and waited for them."I'll bet you," said Specs, "that's George W. Trouble's youngest son. About half the world seems to be needing help to-day. Shall we walk right past without seeing him?""Shall we?" asked Bonfire slyly. "We can pretend, of course, that we don't notice his car, on ahead a bit.""Whose car? Where? How do you know?" Specs was twisting his head and straining his eyes for some glimpse of an automobile. "What makes you think he has a car?"Bonfire grinned. "Well, maybe he carries those goggles in his shirt pocket just to look like a driver, but—""Anybody could guess after seeing them," sniffed Specs, unimpressed. He caught the snicker that was going around the patrol. "Oh, all right! All right!Maybe I did overlook 'em. If you're so smart, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, tell me where the car is and why he isn't riding in it."Bonfire bowed mockingly. "Certainly. The car is down there in the hollow, off to one side of the road. It is stuck in the mud. The man has tried chains on the rear wheels, but it won't pull itself free, even with them. He wants us to give him a lift.""Rats!" said Specs. He dismissed the statements as careless banter. "But if that fellow has a car able to run to Belden, and needs something like a loose switch tightened—" A heavy wink completed the sentence.Bunny frowned. There were times when Specs simply could not and would not remember the Scout law about taking pay for good turns. But it was too late to thresh out the question with him. By this time, they were abreast the young man."Good afternoon, fellows!" he said to them. "I'm in a bit of a mess, with my car stuck in the mud there in the hollow. I swerved off the road, to avoid running down a dog, and plumped into the soft creek-bed. She won't pull out, even with chains."Bunny nodded his willingness to help. He was afraid Specs would blurt out something about pushing out the car in return for a ride to Belden but he need not have worried. Specs was wholly beyond speech. The absolute confirmation of Bonfire's guesses, detail by detail, had left him stunned and dumb."Say," he gasped to that Scout, as they turned to follow the young man to a point where the road dipped into a broad gulley, "how did you figure it all out, anyhow? What did you see that made you know about the mired car?""Nothing," smiled Bonfire good-naturedly. "I didn't see a thing except the goggles; they connected the man with a car. But I did use my ears. Halfway down the hill, when everybody was pretty glum and not saying much, I heard a motor racing, then the clutch thrown in, then a sort of churning, with the motor slowing till it almost stalled. Once or twice it did. So I knew a car was stuck. It was off the road a ways, of course, because this is a state highway, with a rock bottom. And the only place a car would mire is in some low hollow, where the sun never has a chance to shine through the trees and dry the mud. That's all.""But you said the car had chains on.""Oh, yes, the chains. I did use my eyes there. It was the mud on the man's shirt sleeves, where he reached around the tires putting them on, that told me he had tried chains. Anything else you want to know?""What color are his grandmother's eyes?" Specs demanded fiercely. "Tell me that, you bunk detective. What's his sister's middle name? What make of car is it?""Saybrook touring," answered Bonfire, picking up the last question. When Specs, completely dazed bythis new flash of information, looked up with awestruck eyes, the other Scout pointed a gleeful finger at the car beside the road. "All you have to do, my boy, is to keep your eyes and ears open. Come on; Bunny's calling."Getting the car out of the mud was neither a long nor a difficult job. All it required was a little knowledge and common sense. The wheels had evidently sunk a few inches at the outset, and their useless whirling had furrowed a nasty rut, made deeper by the use of chains. But when the boys had helped jack up the rear end and filled the holes with branches, against which the chains could bite, and had made a path of the same material to the solid road, the car pulled itself clear without any trouble at all."Well," said the young man, wiping his forehead, "I might have done all that by myself. Just the same, I'm much obliged." He drew a purse from his pocket. "How much do I owe you?"The "busted" patrol gasped. It was as if they feared their leader might falter before this temptation. But Bunny waved back the bill the young man was offering."Nothing at all," he said. "We are Boy Scouts, and we are not allowed to take pay for doing good turns.""But if you are going to Belden—" Specs began insinuatingly."I'm not," said the young man."If you are," Specs persisted, "or if you could go there, we'd like to be taken along.""Well, I'm not," said the young man again, "and I can't." He said it very decisively. "I'm much obliged for your help, but I can't pay for it—that way." He smiled a little derisively, stepped on the self-starter, and shot the car at the long hill down which the boys had just come."I hope he gets stuck again," snorted Specs, looking at the swirl of dust that marked the young man's going. "I hope he breaks a steering knuckle and six spokes, and has nineteen punctures.""No, you don't, either," Bunny put in. "You're wrong and he's right. Do you realize, Specs, that this is the first time in all our trip we have given a wrong impression of the Boy Scouts? That man thinks we did him a good turn in the hope of a reward; he'll think we always want some kind of pay when we help somebody out. Well, we don't; and what's more, we're going to stop making people think we do."In the face of this gentle reproof, Specs had nothing to say. When they resumed their hike, he fell in at the rear and seemed to be pondering the matter. Opposite the next farmhouse, he drew up to the patrol leader and said, in a nonchalant way. "All right, Bunny; I'm cured." Then, to prove it, he raced into the yard and pumped a trough full of water for an old lady, and raced out again to the Scouts before she had time to thank him.With this minor worry off his mind, Bunny faced the greater problem of getting to Belden in time for the ball game."It's a good nine miles yet," he told the others, "and we have less than two hours to make it. At the Scout pace, we might possibly cover the distance in time, but it would leave us all played out. I guess we'll have to turn in somewhere and—and find another Mr. Jenkins."They were in the lowlands now. The road stretched ahead, as far as the eye could reach, between lush fields of corn and wheat and oats. Grimly, without talking, the boys plodded on, pressing ahead as steadily as if Belden were just around the next corner. But it wasn't, of course, and something had to be done to revive their drooping spirits. At the worst, a halt at some house would serve to break the monotony of the hike.Bunny chose a prosperous looking place on the right. The house was big and freshly painted. The barns and granaries were in good repair. Up-to-date farm implements nearly filled the yard. Everywhere was an air of success.A shaggy shepherd dog ran to meet them, barking uncertainly and wagging its tail, as if divided between a desire to be courteous and yet to serve its master at the same time. Bunny called to the animal, and it came close and sniffed at his legs, and was satisfied. He hoped its owner would prove as friendly.But when he knocked at the door, there were no answering footsteps. He knocked again. A third time. Convinced at last that they were merely wasting precious time, he turned to the others with a little gesture of disappointment."There's nobody home," he said."I can tell you something else," added Bonfire. "The man who lives here doesn't own an automobile; there's no garage. And he has only two horse stalls in that big barn, both empty. Even if he wanted to help us get to Laurel, he couldn't."Bunny nodded gloomily. "We might as well hike on."Fifty yards down the road, Bonfire lifted a pointing hand."Look there!" he shouted. "Three cows in that cornfield, gobbling up those little stalks as if they were prairie grass. I don't believe—Ah, I thought so! See that gap in the fence on the far side. They have broken in.""And nobody around to chase them out," said Specs briskly. "I guess it's a job for us.""What good would it do us?" Bunny tested him. "There isn't a soul about to thank us or to give us a lift on our way."Specs hung his head. "Aw, Bunny!" he protested; "forget it, won't you?"And then everybody laughed, as if it were a great joke, and finally Specs laughed, too. After that, therewas no question about what they meant to do. Nine boys climbed through the barbed-wire fence along the road and went whooping toward the astonished trio of cows. Tender and juicy as the cornstalks were, the animals realized that their stolen meal must end. They turned and galloped awkwardly through the gap in the fence, back into their own field."Sorry, old girls!" shouted Specs, quite himself again, "but you can't eat up a crop just for the sake of one square meal. Besides, you'd get an awful, awful tummy-ache.""Now let's patch up the break," urged Bunny. "We can prop up this broken post and restring these wires. It won't take ten minutes."In something like half that time, the fence was as good as new for all practical purposes. While they were winding the last loose strand about the bolstered post, a voice from the cornfield said pleasantly:"When the boss's away, the cows will play. Thank you, boys; thank you!"The minute Bunny looked at the man, he knew he was going to like him. He stood just beyond the dividing fence, his lean, brown face crinkling into an irresistible smile."Are those your cows, sir?" Bunny asked."I own them," the man admitted, "and I still own the sprouting corn in this field—thanks to you boys. I came up the road just in time to see what you did for me. But I am curious to learn how you happened tobe passing, and why you stopped to save my crop from serious damage. Suppose we all adjourn to my house yonder, where we can talk things over. There is a crock of cold milk there, and a jar of cookies and doughnuts. If you will do me the honor—" He broke short the sentence with another of his big, fine smiles, and turned to lead the way. The Scouts fell in behind him.Over the doughnuts and milk, Bunny fell ready victim to the stranger's warming personality; and somehow, without being able to tell exactly how the conversation started, he was revealing the troubles of the Black Eagle Patrol in getting to the baseball game at Belden, and explaining the mishaps it had encountered. Bonfire's previous assurance that there were no cars or horses on the place made it easier. The man couldn't possibly misunderstand.Nor did he. He knew all about Boy Scouts and good turns without hope of reward, and he nodded and smiled and said, "Exactly!" when Specs remarked that they knew he hadn't any means of taking them to Belden."And I am afraid," the man added, "there isn't a thing on wheels or four legs in this country that hasn't trundled or trotted to the farmers' institute at Middletown this afternoon. That's where my own team went, and I do not own an automobile." He looked quizzically at the boys. "You are ready to admit, I suppose, that you have come to the point in your tripwhere, if it were a story, the author would write 'The End.' It isn't even 'To Be Continued.'""But it is, sir," Bunny denied sturdily. "We're going on to Belden. I know we can't make it afoot in time now; but even if we reach the ball park during the ninth inning, and even if we get there so tired we can hardly move, we're going to make it. We—we aren't quitters, I guess.""Good!" said the man. "I like that spirit. It moves mountains and—hearts." He walked to the window and stared toward a distant field. "Then you boys could not help me on the farm this afternoon, I suppose?""No," Bunny confessed reluctantly, "I'm afraid not.""I did not expect you could," the man said, with his understanding smile. "Anyhow, my machinery needs overhauling by some expert."The nine boys smiled back. A Scout must be cheerful. But it was hard to smile, very hard, with the clock on the wall striking half past one and Belden nine miles away.
ONE CAR AND THREE COWS
The young man looked worried. He was capless and coatless, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled to the elbows. When he saw the nine boys approaching, he stopped and waited for them.
"I'll bet you," said Specs, "that's George W. Trouble's youngest son. About half the world seems to be needing help to-day. Shall we walk right past without seeing him?"
"Shall we?" asked Bonfire slyly. "We can pretend, of course, that we don't notice his car, on ahead a bit."
"Whose car? Where? How do you know?" Specs was twisting his head and straining his eyes for some glimpse of an automobile. "What makes you think he has a car?"
Bonfire grinned. "Well, maybe he carries those goggles in his shirt pocket just to look like a driver, but—"
"Anybody could guess after seeing them," sniffed Specs, unimpressed. He caught the snicker that was going around the patrol. "Oh, all right! All right!Maybe I did overlook 'em. If you're so smart, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, tell me where the car is and why he isn't riding in it."
Bonfire bowed mockingly. "Certainly. The car is down there in the hollow, off to one side of the road. It is stuck in the mud. The man has tried chains on the rear wheels, but it won't pull itself free, even with them. He wants us to give him a lift."
"Rats!" said Specs. He dismissed the statements as careless banter. "But if that fellow has a car able to run to Belden, and needs something like a loose switch tightened—" A heavy wink completed the sentence.
Bunny frowned. There were times when Specs simply could not and would not remember the Scout law about taking pay for good turns. But it was too late to thresh out the question with him. By this time, they were abreast the young man.
"Good afternoon, fellows!" he said to them. "I'm in a bit of a mess, with my car stuck in the mud there in the hollow. I swerved off the road, to avoid running down a dog, and plumped into the soft creek-bed. She won't pull out, even with chains."
Bunny nodded his willingness to help. He was afraid Specs would blurt out something about pushing out the car in return for a ride to Belden but he need not have worried. Specs was wholly beyond speech. The absolute confirmation of Bonfire's guesses, detail by detail, had left him stunned and dumb.
"Say," he gasped to that Scout, as they turned to follow the young man to a point where the road dipped into a broad gulley, "how did you figure it all out, anyhow? What did you see that made you know about the mired car?"
"Nothing," smiled Bonfire good-naturedly. "I didn't see a thing except the goggles; they connected the man with a car. But I did use my ears. Halfway down the hill, when everybody was pretty glum and not saying much, I heard a motor racing, then the clutch thrown in, then a sort of churning, with the motor slowing till it almost stalled. Once or twice it did. So I knew a car was stuck. It was off the road a ways, of course, because this is a state highway, with a rock bottom. And the only place a car would mire is in some low hollow, where the sun never has a chance to shine through the trees and dry the mud. That's all."
"But you said the car had chains on."
"Oh, yes, the chains. I did use my eyes there. It was the mud on the man's shirt sleeves, where he reached around the tires putting them on, that told me he had tried chains. Anything else you want to know?"
"What color are his grandmother's eyes?" Specs demanded fiercely. "Tell me that, you bunk detective. What's his sister's middle name? What make of car is it?"
"Saybrook touring," answered Bonfire, picking up the last question. When Specs, completely dazed bythis new flash of information, looked up with awestruck eyes, the other Scout pointed a gleeful finger at the car beside the road. "All you have to do, my boy, is to keep your eyes and ears open. Come on; Bunny's calling."
Getting the car out of the mud was neither a long nor a difficult job. All it required was a little knowledge and common sense. The wheels had evidently sunk a few inches at the outset, and their useless whirling had furrowed a nasty rut, made deeper by the use of chains. But when the boys had helped jack up the rear end and filled the holes with branches, against which the chains could bite, and had made a path of the same material to the solid road, the car pulled itself clear without any trouble at all.
"Well," said the young man, wiping his forehead, "I might have done all that by myself. Just the same, I'm much obliged." He drew a purse from his pocket. "How much do I owe you?"
The "busted" patrol gasped. It was as if they feared their leader might falter before this temptation. But Bunny waved back the bill the young man was offering.
"Nothing at all," he said. "We are Boy Scouts, and we are not allowed to take pay for doing good turns."
"But if you are going to Belden—" Specs began insinuatingly.
"I'm not," said the young man.
"If you are," Specs persisted, "or if you could go there, we'd like to be taken along."
"Well, I'm not," said the young man again, "and I can't." He said it very decisively. "I'm much obliged for your help, but I can't pay for it—that way." He smiled a little derisively, stepped on the self-starter, and shot the car at the long hill down which the boys had just come.
"I hope he gets stuck again," snorted Specs, looking at the swirl of dust that marked the young man's going. "I hope he breaks a steering knuckle and six spokes, and has nineteen punctures."
"No, you don't, either," Bunny put in. "You're wrong and he's right. Do you realize, Specs, that this is the first time in all our trip we have given a wrong impression of the Boy Scouts? That man thinks we did him a good turn in the hope of a reward; he'll think we always want some kind of pay when we help somebody out. Well, we don't; and what's more, we're going to stop making people think we do."
In the face of this gentle reproof, Specs had nothing to say. When they resumed their hike, he fell in at the rear and seemed to be pondering the matter. Opposite the next farmhouse, he drew up to the patrol leader and said, in a nonchalant way. "All right, Bunny; I'm cured." Then, to prove it, he raced into the yard and pumped a trough full of water for an old lady, and raced out again to the Scouts before she had time to thank him.
With this minor worry off his mind, Bunny faced the greater problem of getting to Belden in time for the ball game.
"It's a good nine miles yet," he told the others, "and we have less than two hours to make it. At the Scout pace, we might possibly cover the distance in time, but it would leave us all played out. I guess we'll have to turn in somewhere and—and find another Mr. Jenkins."
They were in the lowlands now. The road stretched ahead, as far as the eye could reach, between lush fields of corn and wheat and oats. Grimly, without talking, the boys plodded on, pressing ahead as steadily as if Belden were just around the next corner. But it wasn't, of course, and something had to be done to revive their drooping spirits. At the worst, a halt at some house would serve to break the monotony of the hike.
Bunny chose a prosperous looking place on the right. The house was big and freshly painted. The barns and granaries were in good repair. Up-to-date farm implements nearly filled the yard. Everywhere was an air of success.
A shaggy shepherd dog ran to meet them, barking uncertainly and wagging its tail, as if divided between a desire to be courteous and yet to serve its master at the same time. Bunny called to the animal, and it came close and sniffed at his legs, and was satisfied. He hoped its owner would prove as friendly.
But when he knocked at the door, there were no answering footsteps. He knocked again. A third time. Convinced at last that they were merely wasting precious time, he turned to the others with a little gesture of disappointment.
"There's nobody home," he said.
"I can tell you something else," added Bonfire. "The man who lives here doesn't own an automobile; there's no garage. And he has only two horse stalls in that big barn, both empty. Even if he wanted to help us get to Laurel, he couldn't."
Bunny nodded gloomily. "We might as well hike on."
Fifty yards down the road, Bonfire lifted a pointing hand.
"Look there!" he shouted. "Three cows in that cornfield, gobbling up those little stalks as if they were prairie grass. I don't believe—Ah, I thought so! See that gap in the fence on the far side. They have broken in."
"And nobody around to chase them out," said Specs briskly. "I guess it's a job for us."
"What good would it do us?" Bunny tested him. "There isn't a soul about to thank us or to give us a lift on our way."
Specs hung his head. "Aw, Bunny!" he protested; "forget it, won't you?"
And then everybody laughed, as if it were a great joke, and finally Specs laughed, too. After that, therewas no question about what they meant to do. Nine boys climbed through the barbed-wire fence along the road and went whooping toward the astonished trio of cows. Tender and juicy as the cornstalks were, the animals realized that their stolen meal must end. They turned and galloped awkwardly through the gap in the fence, back into their own field.
"Sorry, old girls!" shouted Specs, quite himself again, "but you can't eat up a crop just for the sake of one square meal. Besides, you'd get an awful, awful tummy-ache."
"Now let's patch up the break," urged Bunny. "We can prop up this broken post and restring these wires. It won't take ten minutes."
In something like half that time, the fence was as good as new for all practical purposes. While they were winding the last loose strand about the bolstered post, a voice from the cornfield said pleasantly:
"When the boss's away, the cows will play. Thank you, boys; thank you!"
The minute Bunny looked at the man, he knew he was going to like him. He stood just beyond the dividing fence, his lean, brown face crinkling into an irresistible smile.
"Are those your cows, sir?" Bunny asked.
"I own them," the man admitted, "and I still own the sprouting corn in this field—thanks to you boys. I came up the road just in time to see what you did for me. But I am curious to learn how you happened tobe passing, and why you stopped to save my crop from serious damage. Suppose we all adjourn to my house yonder, where we can talk things over. There is a crock of cold milk there, and a jar of cookies and doughnuts. If you will do me the honor—" He broke short the sentence with another of his big, fine smiles, and turned to lead the way. The Scouts fell in behind him.
Over the doughnuts and milk, Bunny fell ready victim to the stranger's warming personality; and somehow, without being able to tell exactly how the conversation started, he was revealing the troubles of the Black Eagle Patrol in getting to the baseball game at Belden, and explaining the mishaps it had encountered. Bonfire's previous assurance that there were no cars or horses on the place made it easier. The man couldn't possibly misunderstand.
Nor did he. He knew all about Boy Scouts and good turns without hope of reward, and he nodded and smiled and said, "Exactly!" when Specs remarked that they knew he hadn't any means of taking them to Belden.
"And I am afraid," the man added, "there isn't a thing on wheels or four legs in this country that hasn't trundled or trotted to the farmers' institute at Middletown this afternoon. That's where my own team went, and I do not own an automobile." He looked quizzically at the boys. "You are ready to admit, I suppose, that you have come to the point in your tripwhere, if it were a story, the author would write 'The End.' It isn't even 'To Be Continued.'"
"But it is, sir," Bunny denied sturdily. "We're going on to Belden. I know we can't make it afoot in time now; but even if we reach the ball park during the ninth inning, and even if we get there so tired we can hardly move, we're going to make it. We—we aren't quitters, I guess."
"Good!" said the man. "I like that spirit. It moves mountains and—hearts." He walked to the window and stared toward a distant field. "Then you boys could not help me on the farm this afternoon, I suppose?"
"No," Bunny confessed reluctantly, "I'm afraid not."
"I did not expect you could," the man said, with his understanding smile. "Anyhow, my machinery needs overhauling by some expert."
The nine boys smiled back. A Scout must be cheerful. But it was hard to smile, very hard, with the clock on the wall striking half past one and Belden nine miles away.
CHAPTER XXIIILOST: ONE BASEBALL TEAMIn choice seats of the Belden bleachers, opposite first base, sat two men and one girl. Anybody with half an eye could see that the girl was in charge of the party. For instance, every time the gathering fans in the stands chorused the staccato Belden High School yell, she sprang up, like a cheer leader, with her black eyes snapping, and said: "Right back at them now! We'll show them! Ready! One—two—three!" And Mr. Sefton and Mr. Hibbs and Molly Sefton roared defiantly:"U Rah! U Rah!U Rah! Yi!Lakeville! Lakeville!Lakeville High!"Out on the diamond, the Belden team practiced in a desultory fashion, keeping one eye on the ball and the other on the gate of the park—which, it may be remarked in passing, was all right so far as the gate was concerned, but not particularly helpful in batting, throwing, or catching. In fact, the nine was displaying a brand of baseball that would have shamed abunch of kindergartners; and the boys knew it and were consequently irritated. But the fault was not wholly theirs.The trouble was that even at two-thirty with the stands rapidly filling, with the Belden team warming up, and with the umpire waiting patiently and pretending not to see or hear anything that was going on (as all good umpires must pretend before they slip on their chest protectors and fill the pockets of their navy-blue serge coats with balls and go out behind the pitcher and raise their right hands and yell, "Pla-a-ay ba-a-al!")—with everything and everybody apparently ready for the game that was scheduled to begin half an hour later, the opposing Lakeville players had not yet arrived."But they'll come," declared Molly Sefton for the hundredth time. "If they don't"—she stamped her foot angrily—"if they don't come, why—why, we'll just go out there and play that Belden team ourselves." Whereat the portly Mr. Sefton and the gray-haired Mr. Hibbs winced perceptibly."I don't understand it," said the Scout Master of the Black Eagle Patrol, also for the hundredth time. "The train should have arrived long ago.""Nonsense!" snapped Mr. Sefton, speaking as if it were a lesson he was learning by heart. "It's late, that's all. Nothing to worry about. Give them time."Molly saw the man first. He was shouldering hisway up the rows of seats from the ground toward them, and he was doing it with an officiousness that marked him as a person of importance. He wore a black suit, almost ministerial in cut, a stiff white shirt, and a black bow tie of the sort that is put on by tucking two stiff ends underneath the flaps of a turn-down collar."Gentlemen," he said, halting before the two Lakeville men and ignoring Miss Molly altogether, "where is your baseball team?"Mr. Sefton held him eye to eye. "It's coming," he announced confidently."Are you the Belden coach?" Horace Hibbs asked mildly."No, gentlemen, I am not the coach. I am, you might say, the man behind the team. Throughout the season, I have been its supporter, its mainstay, its benefactor. Allow me to offer an illustration of what I mean. Do you see that flagstaff?""Yes.""I contributed that. When Belden has won this game, I shall run up the pennant with my own hands, and I shall, at the request of my friends, say—ahem, a few words of congratulation to the team and the assembled crowd.""Indeed!" remarked Mr. Sefton, without any great show of enthusiasm."But I am digressing," the great one stated. "I came here to warn you gentlemen that if, on the strokeof three o'clock, the Lakeville team is still missing, I shall instruct the umpire to forfeit the game by the usual score of nine to nothing. Immediately, I shall award the pennant to Belden and begin—ahem, my speech. I thank you, gentlemen.""For what?" gasped Mr. Sefton, watching the man push his way to the bottom of the stand. "Look here, Horace, they can't do that, can they?"Mr. Hibbs shook a worried head. "I don't know," he confessed. "In golf or tennis, of course, if a player does not report, he forfeits his contest. And there is a baseball rule to the effect that if a team refuses to play—"A boy stalked along the ground at the foot of the bleachers. He was waving a paper and shouting: "Horace Hibbs! Message for Horace Hibbs! Horace Hibbs! Message for—""Up here, boy!" Molly sprang to her feet, waving wildly. "Right up here!—Let him pass,please! Thankyou!—This is Mr. Hibbs—Quick! What is it?"With nervous haste, Horace Hibbs unfolded the paper. The message was scrawled in a free, running hand, with several erasures, as if it had been taken over a telephone. He read it to the other two:Tell Horace Hibbs, Belden High School baseball park, that Lakeville team has been delayed by bad freight wreck on railroad ahead. May be very late in arriving. Hold game.—Leland."Oh!" gasped Molly. It was as if somebody had struck her a stinging blow on the cheek. She felt the pain, the mental despair, and then, as the numbness passed, a tingling anger and unreasoning spleen against the world in general. "Oh!" she said again, crimsoning. "They are in trouble. It isn't fair. Why don't you men do something? Dad, how can you sit quietly when the boys need help?"Mr. Sefton took the message from Horace Hibbs and smoothed it upon his knee. "H'm! No time mentioned; no name of the place where they are stranded. But they will know at the Belden station. I will get in touch with the team by telephone; then we will see what can be done." And with a final admonition not to worry, he was gone.With troubled eyes, Molly Sefton and Horace Hibbs followed his course across the park. Once, near the ball players on the diamond, he seemed to hesitate, as if to offer them some explanation; then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he marched on without stopping. Again, near home plate, he turned his head at the call of the pompous man who meant to award the pennant to Belden. Even from where they sat, the girl and the Scout Master could see Mr. Sefton smile and nod confidently. He believed the Lakeville team would yet arrive safely, and he meant to make the important person believe it, too."Good old Dad!" beamed Molly. She squirmed sideways on her seat. "Talk to me, Horace Hibbs.Tell me the team will come. Tell me it will be here in time. It must, you know; it just must!""Of course," said Horace Hibbs simply, "it will come." There was something so earnest in the boyish way he said it, and in the plausible reasons he gave later for expecting the missing team, that Molly felt her courage warming again. The twin worried lines from the top of her nose to the middle of her forehead ironed out; the corners of her mouth quirked into the forerunner of an honest smile.In the meantime, though, the minutes had been ticking away. It was a quarter of three now. Up and down the stands, impatient fans, who could not understand why the Lakeville nine did not take the field for practice, were shuffling their feet uneasily, and calling, "Play ball! Play ball!"The messenger came a second time. He knew now where to find Horace Hibbs, and he was holding out the scribbled paper before either Molly or the Scout Master saw him. It read:We are leaving to walk around wreck to Elkana, where conductor tells us they may start another train for Belden, to take place of one held up by blocked track.—Leland."Wait!" Molly called to the boy as he was turning away. "Where did you get this?""Long-distance telephone to the grand-stand over there."Molly dismissed him with a wave of her hand."Then Dad won't know where to reach the team," she said, puckering her mouth as she thought rapidly. "You must find him here at the station, Horace Hibbs, and tell him to call up Elkana. Run along. Don't waste a minute. If they are really coming, I will keep this game from starting till they get here."Obediently, the man rose. Whatever doubts he may have entertained as to her ability to handle the situation at the ball park vanished before the determination expressed by her pursed lips and clenched fists. She was competent, Horace told himself; yes, as competent as any Scout in the Black Eagle Patrol.With both her father and Horace Hibbs gone, Molly realized that she was now the single Lakeville representative in all that crowd. The thought sent little prickles down her rigid back, and she caught herself plucking nervously at her skirt. The discovery wounded her pride."Now, Molly Sefton," she admonished herself severely, clasping the errant hands in her lap, "don't be a good-for-nothing, sniveling little coward!"More time passed. More fans stamped their feet and yelled, "Play ball!" The important person who was going to have the umpire forfeit the game strutted to the bottom of the rows of seats. There, watch in hand, he looked up near-sightedly, without discovering that two thirds of his former audience had disappeared, and said, in a voice like fate, "Five minutes more, gentlemen; five minutes!"Molly was having a good deal of trouble keeping herself in leash. She wavered between a desire to shriek at the top of her voice and another to get out the little lace-fringed handkerchief Aunt Ella had given her, and have a good cry. It took courage to fight back both temptations. Instead, she plucked at the sleeve of the high-school boy at her side."Will you do me a favor,please?"The high-school boy would."Run down there to the diamond, then," Molly commanded, "and ask the captain of the Belden team to come here a minute,please!"She liked the boy in uniform who responded to her call. He had round blue eyes, lots of freckles, and a smile that came without coaxing. It was easy to tell him the troubles Lakeville's team was encountering."So they are coming, you understand," she finished breathlessly. "If you will just hold the game a few minutes, till they get here—""Why sure!" The boy fumbled with his cap and spoke awkwardly, but there was no doubting his sincerity. "We meant to postpone the start till your team came, of course.""But that—that man—" Molly halted until she had spied the important person and pointed him out to the Belden captain. "That man said he would tell the umpire to forfeit the game at three o'clock if our boys weren't here.""So he could make a speech, huh?" The boy'ssmile revealed two rows of gleaming white teeth. "That's old Senator Cannon, who used to be in the State legislature; he'd rather make a speech, I guess, than eat. Regular talking machine, that man. But he isn't running our ball team. Why, he wanted to award the pennant last week, after we licked Elkana—so's he could make a speech, you see.""The idea!" sniffed Miss Sefton in her most grown-up manner."But we fellows voted 'no' on his little scheme. Said we had Lakeville to trim for a clear title to the State championship. That's why we are so keen to play to-day, even if we start a bit late. You know, it's this afternoon or never, because school ended yesterday, and we can't very well postpone the game.""Oh, you won't have to worry that way," Molly assured the Belden captain. "Our team is surely coming. It—it—" She faltered at sight of the messenger, on his third trip that day. Some inkling of impending disaster gripped her. Before she spoke again, she moistened her lips. "Well, what is it now?""Message for Horace Hibbs."Molly reached for the paper. She had meant to ask for it, but the words would not come. All at once, she was afraid of what those scrawled words might reveal. The Belden captain watched her curiously.But she was no coward. She would prove that much. So, calling upon every ounce of her will powerto steady her fingers, she calmly unfolded the paper and read the message. There was not even the flicker of an eyebrow to suggest its import. When she had deciphered the final blur that stood for "Leland", she looked up at the boy."I am sorry," she said in a low, hurt voice, "but I am afraid we can't play the game, after all. The team is—is not coming."For the message read:Tell Horace Hibbs, baseball park, that no train will leave Elkana for Belden before night. Too far and too late to use automobile. We are getting ready to start back home.—Leland.If the Belden boy spoke to her, Molly did not hear him. For a time, indeed, the measuredpound-pound-poundof her heart tolled so loudly that it deafened her to all else. Not till her quickening ears counted the three strokes of some belled clock in town did she become conscious of the babel about her.It was time for the game to begin. To the rhythm of thousands of stamping feet, the fans were dinning, "Start the game! Start the game!" Off down the road, outside the park, a muffled roar grew and doubled in volume, like distant thunder coming closer and closer. It rumbled to the very gate; it died to a faint putter. As the great swinging doors flung wide, it belched forth once more, nerve-racking, ear-rending.Then Molly gasped and stared.Into the ball park rolled the queerest contrivance shehad ever seen—a great engine, running on broad, endless belts instead of wheels, and towing behind it a half-loaded hayrack."It's a farm tractor!" said a startled voice below her."It's the Lakeville baseball team!" screamed Molly watching Bunny Payton and Bi Jones jump from the hayrack, with at least seven other boys ready to spill over the sides.She experienced a sudden absurd pity for the man who wanted to forfeit the game, that he might make a speech, and for the blue-eyed, freckled Belden captain who was about to lead his team to defeat, and for all those fans who counted confidently on a Belden victory.They were very still now, very apprehensive. In a little while, she guessed, they would be sorry the Lakeville nine had ever come. She laughed hysterically and sprang to her feet. With a Lakeville High banner streaming in the wind, she shrieked at the top of her voice:"Play ball!"
LOST: ONE BASEBALL TEAM
In choice seats of the Belden bleachers, opposite first base, sat two men and one girl. Anybody with half an eye could see that the girl was in charge of the party. For instance, every time the gathering fans in the stands chorused the staccato Belden High School yell, she sprang up, like a cheer leader, with her black eyes snapping, and said: "Right back at them now! We'll show them! Ready! One—two—three!" And Mr. Sefton and Mr. Hibbs and Molly Sefton roared defiantly:
"U Rah! U Rah!U Rah! Yi!
Lakeville! Lakeville!Lakeville High!"
Out on the diamond, the Belden team practiced in a desultory fashion, keeping one eye on the ball and the other on the gate of the park—which, it may be remarked in passing, was all right so far as the gate was concerned, but not particularly helpful in batting, throwing, or catching. In fact, the nine was displaying a brand of baseball that would have shamed abunch of kindergartners; and the boys knew it and were consequently irritated. But the fault was not wholly theirs.
The trouble was that even at two-thirty with the stands rapidly filling, with the Belden team warming up, and with the umpire waiting patiently and pretending not to see or hear anything that was going on (as all good umpires must pretend before they slip on their chest protectors and fill the pockets of their navy-blue serge coats with balls and go out behind the pitcher and raise their right hands and yell, "Pla-a-ay ba-a-al!")—with everything and everybody apparently ready for the game that was scheduled to begin half an hour later, the opposing Lakeville players had not yet arrived.
"But they'll come," declared Molly Sefton for the hundredth time. "If they don't"—she stamped her foot angrily—"if they don't come, why—why, we'll just go out there and play that Belden team ourselves." Whereat the portly Mr. Sefton and the gray-haired Mr. Hibbs winced perceptibly.
"I don't understand it," said the Scout Master of the Black Eagle Patrol, also for the hundredth time. "The train should have arrived long ago."
"Nonsense!" snapped Mr. Sefton, speaking as if it were a lesson he was learning by heart. "It's late, that's all. Nothing to worry about. Give them time."
Molly saw the man first. He was shouldering hisway up the rows of seats from the ground toward them, and he was doing it with an officiousness that marked him as a person of importance. He wore a black suit, almost ministerial in cut, a stiff white shirt, and a black bow tie of the sort that is put on by tucking two stiff ends underneath the flaps of a turn-down collar.
"Gentlemen," he said, halting before the two Lakeville men and ignoring Miss Molly altogether, "where is your baseball team?"
Mr. Sefton held him eye to eye. "It's coming," he announced confidently.
"Are you the Belden coach?" Horace Hibbs asked mildly.
"No, gentlemen, I am not the coach. I am, you might say, the man behind the team. Throughout the season, I have been its supporter, its mainstay, its benefactor. Allow me to offer an illustration of what I mean. Do you see that flagstaff?"
"Yes."
"I contributed that. When Belden has won this game, I shall run up the pennant with my own hands, and I shall, at the request of my friends, say—ahem, a few words of congratulation to the team and the assembled crowd."
"Indeed!" remarked Mr. Sefton, without any great show of enthusiasm.
"But I am digressing," the great one stated. "I came here to warn you gentlemen that if, on the strokeof three o'clock, the Lakeville team is still missing, I shall instruct the umpire to forfeit the game by the usual score of nine to nothing. Immediately, I shall award the pennant to Belden and begin—ahem, my speech. I thank you, gentlemen."
"For what?" gasped Mr. Sefton, watching the man push his way to the bottom of the stand. "Look here, Horace, they can't do that, can they?"
Mr. Hibbs shook a worried head. "I don't know," he confessed. "In golf or tennis, of course, if a player does not report, he forfeits his contest. And there is a baseball rule to the effect that if a team refuses to play—"
A boy stalked along the ground at the foot of the bleachers. He was waving a paper and shouting: "Horace Hibbs! Message for Horace Hibbs! Horace Hibbs! Message for—"
"Up here, boy!" Molly sprang to her feet, waving wildly. "Right up here!—Let him pass,please! Thankyou!—This is Mr. Hibbs—Quick! What is it?"
With nervous haste, Horace Hibbs unfolded the paper. The message was scrawled in a free, running hand, with several erasures, as if it had been taken over a telephone. He read it to the other two:
Tell Horace Hibbs, Belden High School baseball park, that Lakeville team has been delayed by bad freight wreck on railroad ahead. May be very late in arriving. Hold game.—Leland.
"Oh!" gasped Molly. It was as if somebody had struck her a stinging blow on the cheek. She felt the pain, the mental despair, and then, as the numbness passed, a tingling anger and unreasoning spleen against the world in general. "Oh!" she said again, crimsoning. "They are in trouble. It isn't fair. Why don't you men do something? Dad, how can you sit quietly when the boys need help?"
Mr. Sefton took the message from Horace Hibbs and smoothed it upon his knee. "H'm! No time mentioned; no name of the place where they are stranded. But they will know at the Belden station. I will get in touch with the team by telephone; then we will see what can be done." And with a final admonition not to worry, he was gone.
With troubled eyes, Molly Sefton and Horace Hibbs followed his course across the park. Once, near the ball players on the diamond, he seemed to hesitate, as if to offer them some explanation; then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he marched on without stopping. Again, near home plate, he turned his head at the call of the pompous man who meant to award the pennant to Belden. Even from where they sat, the girl and the Scout Master could see Mr. Sefton smile and nod confidently. He believed the Lakeville team would yet arrive safely, and he meant to make the important person believe it, too.
"Good old Dad!" beamed Molly. She squirmed sideways on her seat. "Talk to me, Horace Hibbs.Tell me the team will come. Tell me it will be here in time. It must, you know; it just must!"
"Of course," said Horace Hibbs simply, "it will come." There was something so earnest in the boyish way he said it, and in the plausible reasons he gave later for expecting the missing team, that Molly felt her courage warming again. The twin worried lines from the top of her nose to the middle of her forehead ironed out; the corners of her mouth quirked into the forerunner of an honest smile.
In the meantime, though, the minutes had been ticking away. It was a quarter of three now. Up and down the stands, impatient fans, who could not understand why the Lakeville nine did not take the field for practice, were shuffling their feet uneasily, and calling, "Play ball! Play ball!"
The messenger came a second time. He knew now where to find Horace Hibbs, and he was holding out the scribbled paper before either Molly or the Scout Master saw him. It read:
We are leaving to walk around wreck to Elkana, where conductor tells us they may start another train for Belden, to take place of one held up by blocked track.—Leland.
"Wait!" Molly called to the boy as he was turning away. "Where did you get this?"
"Long-distance telephone to the grand-stand over there."
Molly dismissed him with a wave of her hand."Then Dad won't know where to reach the team," she said, puckering her mouth as she thought rapidly. "You must find him here at the station, Horace Hibbs, and tell him to call up Elkana. Run along. Don't waste a minute. If they are really coming, I will keep this game from starting till they get here."
Obediently, the man rose. Whatever doubts he may have entertained as to her ability to handle the situation at the ball park vanished before the determination expressed by her pursed lips and clenched fists. She was competent, Horace told himself; yes, as competent as any Scout in the Black Eagle Patrol.
With both her father and Horace Hibbs gone, Molly realized that she was now the single Lakeville representative in all that crowd. The thought sent little prickles down her rigid back, and she caught herself plucking nervously at her skirt. The discovery wounded her pride.
"Now, Molly Sefton," she admonished herself severely, clasping the errant hands in her lap, "don't be a good-for-nothing, sniveling little coward!"
More time passed. More fans stamped their feet and yelled, "Play ball!" The important person who was going to have the umpire forfeit the game strutted to the bottom of the rows of seats. There, watch in hand, he looked up near-sightedly, without discovering that two thirds of his former audience had disappeared, and said, in a voice like fate, "Five minutes more, gentlemen; five minutes!"
Molly was having a good deal of trouble keeping herself in leash. She wavered between a desire to shriek at the top of her voice and another to get out the little lace-fringed handkerchief Aunt Ella had given her, and have a good cry. It took courage to fight back both temptations. Instead, she plucked at the sleeve of the high-school boy at her side.
"Will you do me a favor,please?"
The high-school boy would.
"Run down there to the diamond, then," Molly commanded, "and ask the captain of the Belden team to come here a minute,please!"
She liked the boy in uniform who responded to her call. He had round blue eyes, lots of freckles, and a smile that came without coaxing. It was easy to tell him the troubles Lakeville's team was encountering.
"So they are coming, you understand," she finished breathlessly. "If you will just hold the game a few minutes, till they get here—"
"Why sure!" The boy fumbled with his cap and spoke awkwardly, but there was no doubting his sincerity. "We meant to postpone the start till your team came, of course."
"But that—that man—" Molly halted until she had spied the important person and pointed him out to the Belden captain. "That man said he would tell the umpire to forfeit the game at three o'clock if our boys weren't here."
"So he could make a speech, huh?" The boy'ssmile revealed two rows of gleaming white teeth. "That's old Senator Cannon, who used to be in the State legislature; he'd rather make a speech, I guess, than eat. Regular talking machine, that man. But he isn't running our ball team. Why, he wanted to award the pennant last week, after we licked Elkana—so's he could make a speech, you see."
"The idea!" sniffed Miss Sefton in her most grown-up manner.
"But we fellows voted 'no' on his little scheme. Said we had Lakeville to trim for a clear title to the State championship. That's why we are so keen to play to-day, even if we start a bit late. You know, it's this afternoon or never, because school ended yesterday, and we can't very well postpone the game."
"Oh, you won't have to worry that way," Molly assured the Belden captain. "Our team is surely coming. It—it—" She faltered at sight of the messenger, on his third trip that day. Some inkling of impending disaster gripped her. Before she spoke again, she moistened her lips. "Well, what is it now?"
"Message for Horace Hibbs."
Molly reached for the paper. She had meant to ask for it, but the words would not come. All at once, she was afraid of what those scrawled words might reveal. The Belden captain watched her curiously.
But she was no coward. She would prove that much. So, calling upon every ounce of her will powerto steady her fingers, she calmly unfolded the paper and read the message. There was not even the flicker of an eyebrow to suggest its import. When she had deciphered the final blur that stood for "Leland", she looked up at the boy.
"I am sorry," she said in a low, hurt voice, "but I am afraid we can't play the game, after all. The team is—is not coming."
For the message read:
Tell Horace Hibbs, baseball park, that no train will leave Elkana for Belden before night. Too far and too late to use automobile. We are getting ready to start back home.—Leland.
If the Belden boy spoke to her, Molly did not hear him. For a time, indeed, the measuredpound-pound-poundof her heart tolled so loudly that it deafened her to all else. Not till her quickening ears counted the three strokes of some belled clock in town did she become conscious of the babel about her.
It was time for the game to begin. To the rhythm of thousands of stamping feet, the fans were dinning, "Start the game! Start the game!" Off down the road, outside the park, a muffled roar grew and doubled in volume, like distant thunder coming closer and closer. It rumbled to the very gate; it died to a faint putter. As the great swinging doors flung wide, it belched forth once more, nerve-racking, ear-rending.
Then Molly gasped and stared.
Into the ball park rolled the queerest contrivance shehad ever seen—a great engine, running on broad, endless belts instead of wheels, and towing behind it a half-loaded hayrack.
"It's a farm tractor!" said a startled voice below her.
"It's the Lakeville baseball team!" screamed Molly watching Bunny Payton and Bi Jones jump from the hayrack, with at least seven other boys ready to spill over the sides.
She experienced a sudden absurd pity for the man who wanted to forfeit the game, that he might make a speech, and for the blue-eyed, freckled Belden captain who was about to lead his team to defeat, and for all those fans who counted confidently on a Belden victory.
They were very still now, very apprehensive. In a little while, she guessed, they would be sorry the Lakeville nine had ever come. She laughed hysterically and sprang to her feet. With a Lakeville High banner streaming in the wind, she shrieked at the top of her voice:
"Play ball!"
CHAPTER XXIVMOLLY INSISTSAs he leaped from the hayrack, Bunny glanced apprehensively toward the diamond. It was a little after three, he knew, and he was afraid the game had already begun. Even with the substitutes, Lakeville might be holding her own; but he guessed shrewdly that Buck and Barrett and Sheffield and the others would be pretty glad to see the remaining members of the regular nine.But something was clearly wrong. The Belden players were batting and fielding fungoes and grounders, with not a single Lakeville fellow in sight. Even the Lakeville bench was empty. And now, for the first time, he became aware that no spontaneous cheer had greeted the arrival of the Scouts. The scattering applause had come from the Belden fans; it was no more than polite interest in their appearance at this eleventh hour. Yes, something was decidedly wrong.The patter of running feet and the flutter of swishing skirts spun him around as abruptly as if some drillmaster had commanded, "About face!""Hello, Molly!" he said to the flushed girl who stood before him. "Where are the other players?""They aren't coming," cried Molly Sefton breathlessly. "A wreck blocked the track. And, oh, Bunny, they want to forfeit the game, and a mean old man is going to make a speech and award the pennant to Belden, and they can't postpone it till some other day because it's the end of the season, and everybody thinks you are afraid to play for the championship—afraid, Bunny! But you aren't, are you? And there are nine of you boys here now, and—"Bunny stopped her with a bewildered gesture. "Just a moment, Molly. Let's understand all this." And he began to ply her with questions, till the whole story was told. At its end, he nodded dubiously."And now you're here, at last," the girl said triumphantly, as if their presence righted the universe."Yes, we 're here," Bunny admitted. "An hour or so ago, we didn't think there was a chance of making it, either. You see, we were talking to a farmer who didn't own an automobile and whose horses were all out. He said that he didn't belong to any patrol, so far as he knew, but that he guessed he must be a Boy Scout at heart, because he tried to live up to all the laws of the organization. And then, all at once, he remembered something, and slapped his knee, and said, 'Boys, I haven't done my good turn to-day, and I've just thought of a way. My farm tractor needsoverhauling by the agency in Belden. I'll hitch it up to a hayrack and haul you all there.' So he did.""Wasn't that splendid!" said Molly, clapping her hands. "And just think, there are exactly nine of you boys—enough for a baseball team!""Nine of us, yes," agreed Bunny, "but only three of the regular Lakeville team, not counting Bi and myself, who are pitchers. Too many substitutes, Molly. Still—" He paused doubtfully."Play them!" urged the girl. "Beat them! I just know you can do it—you Scouts!"Bunny considered. "I might use Bi behind the bat," he said, weakening, "and I could pitch. With Roundy and Jump and Specs and—and S. S., we would have a fairly good infield. Nap might do for center field, too." He felt this was stretching the facts a bit, but he couldn't very well say Nap was merely better than nobody. "Only—well, at the start of the season, there were just two fellows in school who didn't try for the team—Bonfire Cree and Prissy Prissler. I'd have to play them in right and left fields.""But Bonfire can bat," Molly declared loyally. "Don't you remember that home run he knocked the first day of school?""It was an accident; he says so himself. You saw him fan on three straight balls at your picnic afterward.""He can bat," Molly insisted stubbornly. "I justknow he can, if he really has to. And Prissler will do his best to help you win. Besides, Bunny, there's that mean old man who wants to give Belden the pennant, and all those fans who will think you are afraid to play."Bunny smiled at her. She was only a girl, of course, and she could not be expected to understand the difficulties such a patched-up team must encounter. But she believed in the Scouts; she had faith in them. After all, however the game might go, they could not afford to sacrifice Molly's friendship. And they might—justmight—win!"We'll play," he told her quietly. "Now, where's the Belden captain? I wonder if he will allow us to practice for a few minutes."The blue-eyed, freckle-faced leader of the home team came quickly at Molly's call. "How are you, Payton?" he said, shaking hands with the Lakeville captain. "Practice? Sure; as long as you like. Got any uniforms or bats or gloves or balls? H'm! We can fix you up on everything except uniforms, but—""Never mind them," Bunny interrupted. "We've walked and ridden forty miles or so in these clothes we're wearing, and I guess we can play baseball in them. Hi, fellows!"The practice was disquieting. The infield might have been reasonably air-tight except for the leak at third base. On that difficult corner of the diamond,Substitute S. S. Zane speedily proved that stopping sizzling grounders demanded more skill than he possessed. Out in the field, Substitute Nap Meeker missed and snared flies for an average of about .500, Substitute Bonfire Cree eventually managed to catch one soaring fungo hit, and Substitute Prissy Prissler divided his busy moments between muffing every ball that touched his hands and misjudging all the rest.The fans jeered openly. On the bench, the watchful Belden players tried honestly to hide the pleased grins that kept curling their mouths. Their blue-eyed, freckle-faced captain strode out to where Bunny was warming up by pitching to Bi."If your team needs more time for practice," he offered generously, "don't be afraid to ask for it."Bunny plumped a singing inshoot into Bi's big pad before he answered."Thank you," he said. "We are ready to start the game any time now." He watched a black-garbed man walk past, muttering to himself as if he were rehearsing some speech. "And don't be too sure," he flung over his shoulder at the Belden captain, "that you are going to win that championship, either. You have to beat us first."
MOLLY INSISTS
As he leaped from the hayrack, Bunny glanced apprehensively toward the diamond. It was a little after three, he knew, and he was afraid the game had already begun. Even with the substitutes, Lakeville might be holding her own; but he guessed shrewdly that Buck and Barrett and Sheffield and the others would be pretty glad to see the remaining members of the regular nine.
But something was clearly wrong. The Belden players were batting and fielding fungoes and grounders, with not a single Lakeville fellow in sight. Even the Lakeville bench was empty. And now, for the first time, he became aware that no spontaneous cheer had greeted the arrival of the Scouts. The scattering applause had come from the Belden fans; it was no more than polite interest in their appearance at this eleventh hour. Yes, something was decidedly wrong.
The patter of running feet and the flutter of swishing skirts spun him around as abruptly as if some drillmaster had commanded, "About face!"
"Hello, Molly!" he said to the flushed girl who stood before him. "Where are the other players?"
"They aren't coming," cried Molly Sefton breathlessly. "A wreck blocked the track. And, oh, Bunny, they want to forfeit the game, and a mean old man is going to make a speech and award the pennant to Belden, and they can't postpone it till some other day because it's the end of the season, and everybody thinks you are afraid to play for the championship—afraid, Bunny! But you aren't, are you? And there are nine of you boys here now, and—"
Bunny stopped her with a bewildered gesture. "Just a moment, Molly. Let's understand all this." And he began to ply her with questions, till the whole story was told. At its end, he nodded dubiously.
"And now you're here, at last," the girl said triumphantly, as if their presence righted the universe.
"Yes, we 're here," Bunny admitted. "An hour or so ago, we didn't think there was a chance of making it, either. You see, we were talking to a farmer who didn't own an automobile and whose horses were all out. He said that he didn't belong to any patrol, so far as he knew, but that he guessed he must be a Boy Scout at heart, because he tried to live up to all the laws of the organization. And then, all at once, he remembered something, and slapped his knee, and said, 'Boys, I haven't done my good turn to-day, and I've just thought of a way. My farm tractor needsoverhauling by the agency in Belden. I'll hitch it up to a hayrack and haul you all there.' So he did."
"Wasn't that splendid!" said Molly, clapping her hands. "And just think, there are exactly nine of you boys—enough for a baseball team!"
"Nine of us, yes," agreed Bunny, "but only three of the regular Lakeville team, not counting Bi and myself, who are pitchers. Too many substitutes, Molly. Still—" He paused doubtfully.
"Play them!" urged the girl. "Beat them! I just know you can do it—you Scouts!"
Bunny considered. "I might use Bi behind the bat," he said, weakening, "and I could pitch. With Roundy and Jump and Specs and—and S. S., we would have a fairly good infield. Nap might do for center field, too." He felt this was stretching the facts a bit, but he couldn't very well say Nap was merely better than nobody. "Only—well, at the start of the season, there were just two fellows in school who didn't try for the team—Bonfire Cree and Prissy Prissler. I'd have to play them in right and left fields."
"But Bonfire can bat," Molly declared loyally. "Don't you remember that home run he knocked the first day of school?"
"It was an accident; he says so himself. You saw him fan on three straight balls at your picnic afterward."
"He can bat," Molly insisted stubbornly. "I justknow he can, if he really has to. And Prissler will do his best to help you win. Besides, Bunny, there's that mean old man who wants to give Belden the pennant, and all those fans who will think you are afraid to play."
Bunny smiled at her. She was only a girl, of course, and she could not be expected to understand the difficulties such a patched-up team must encounter. But she believed in the Scouts; she had faith in them. After all, however the game might go, they could not afford to sacrifice Molly's friendship. And they might—justmight—win!
"We'll play," he told her quietly. "Now, where's the Belden captain? I wonder if he will allow us to practice for a few minutes."
The blue-eyed, freckle-faced leader of the home team came quickly at Molly's call. "How are you, Payton?" he said, shaking hands with the Lakeville captain. "Practice? Sure; as long as you like. Got any uniforms or bats or gloves or balls? H'm! We can fix you up on everything except uniforms, but—"
"Never mind them," Bunny interrupted. "We've walked and ridden forty miles or so in these clothes we're wearing, and I guess we can play baseball in them. Hi, fellows!"
The practice was disquieting. The infield might have been reasonably air-tight except for the leak at third base. On that difficult corner of the diamond,Substitute S. S. Zane speedily proved that stopping sizzling grounders demanded more skill than he possessed. Out in the field, Substitute Nap Meeker missed and snared flies for an average of about .500, Substitute Bonfire Cree eventually managed to catch one soaring fungo hit, and Substitute Prissy Prissler divided his busy moments between muffing every ball that touched his hands and misjudging all the rest.
The fans jeered openly. On the bench, the watchful Belden players tried honestly to hide the pleased grins that kept curling their mouths. Their blue-eyed, freckle-faced captain strode out to where Bunny was warming up by pitching to Bi.
"If your team needs more time for practice," he offered generously, "don't be afraid to ask for it."
Bunny plumped a singing inshoot into Bi's big pad before he answered.
"Thank you," he said. "We are ready to start the game any time now." He watched a black-garbed man walk past, muttering to himself as if he were rehearsing some speech. "And don't be too sure," he flung over his shoulder at the Belden captain, "that you are going to win that championship, either. You have to beat us first."
CHAPTER XXVSUBSTITUTES' DAYA gong clanged. The umpire brushed off home plate with his little whisk broom. When he turned to face the stands, the fans stilled expectantly."Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "the batteries for to-day's game are: for Lakeville, Payton and Jones; for Belden, Bonner and Clark."Substitute No. 1Out in center field, Nap Meeker looked up at the blue sky and said, very solemnly, "This is my lucky day." More than one hundred years before, history has it, the little Corsican for whom Nap was nicknamed went forth to battle with these same words on his lips. To both boy and soldier, perhaps, they marked the summoning of courage for what was to come.For Nap dreaded the impending game. He had little skill as a player, and none knew it better than himself. This afternoon, for example, he would much have preferred to bury his nose in some unread biography of Napoleon, and live for an hour or morein those stirring times when ambition and accomplishment vaulted straight to a throne.But he had accepted the challenge to play. As a Boy Scout, he could do no less. Loyalty to his leader, to the team, and to the school, were in his mind as inflexible as must have been the loyalty of Napoleon's soldiers to their leader in those other days. Nor was that the limit of Nap's resolution. If he were to play at all, he must actually help to make victory possible. He must offset his lack of technical skill with strategy. He must out-guess, out-plan, out-general the opposing team. For hadn't his hero once said that most battles were won in the council room, before a shot was fired?As a result of the toss, which Bunny had won, Belden batted first. Nap shuffled about nervously as the Lakeville captain took his three practice pitches and Bi shot the last ball to Jump, on second, who swooped low to tag an imaginary runner. Then the umpire lifted his hand. "Play ball!" he said; and the game was on.It was hard for Nap to remain inactive during the first half of that initial inning. He wished he were a star pitcher, like Bunny, with the balance of each play hinging upon his delivery; failing that, he even found himself hoping a fly ball might come sailing to him. But nothing happened to test his mettle. The first Belden batter fanned on three pitched balls; the second fouled to Bi, who calmly slipped off his mask andsmothered the little pop-up without moving from his tracks; the third grounded out to Roundy, who made the play unassisted. Then Nap trotted in from the field, only to watch Specs, Jump and Bunny retired in one-two-three order. He trotted back to center field again. In a way, he began to understand what Napoleon meant when, with the war raging elsewhere, he chafed in the city and said, "Paris weighs on me like a leaden mantle."But in the second inning, opportunity beckoned to Nap. A Belden batter shot a stinging grass-clipper straight at S. S., and that youth allowed it to trickle between his legs. The next batter flied over second. With the cry, "Let me have it!" Nap came charging in for the catch.It was not a difficult ball to handle. Jump might have backed under it easily. But Jump's play just then, with a runner on first, was to guard the keystone sack. All this Nap sensed in an instant; all this—and something more.The batter was merely trotting toward first. He had no hope of an error; he could already see the play reported, "Flied out to center field." But Nap, racing toward the falling ball, was fairly quivering with the hope of a strategy that filled his heart to bursting.He was under the fly now. He lifted his hands for the catch, stealing a final glance to assure himself that the batter was still only half way to first; then, abruptly, he took one backward step, allowed the ballto hit the ground, caught it as it bounced, and shot it unerringly to Jump.There was no need of shouting a warning to Jump. He was baseball wise. He knew what to do. Plumping one foot on the bag, and thus forcing the runner who had been on first, he whipped the ball to Roundy for the second put-out, before the astonished batter could galvanize his legs enough to beat the throw. Nap had out-witted batter and runner. There were now two out, with nobody on base.All the Scouts cheered. Bunny shouted some unintelligible word of thanks and congratulation, accompanied by a broad grin. Stalking back to his position in deep center field, Nap said softly to himself, "I'm glad I did it if it pleases him." Perhaps this was some hazy recollection of Napoleon's message to Josephine. "I prize victory," he had written, "since it pleases you."The last Belden batter that inning swung at three wide balls without ticking a foul.For Lakeville, the last half of the second began well. Bi laced a clean single over short. Roundy laid down a perfect bunt, and beat out the throw to first. S. S. walked on four balls. And it was in this tense situation, bases full and nobody out, that Nap came to bat for the first time.Just at that moment, he would have given a million dollars for the skill to lash out a long hit. But he knew, deep down in his heart, that he could never doit. Agonizing recollections of his usual attempts, resulting in feeble grounders to some waiting fielder, seared his mind. Already he could foresee the havoc he might create. In all probability, he would bat into a double or even a triple play, that would wipe clean the bases, like some remorseless scythe.His hands slipped up on the handle of the bat. Bonner, the Belden pitcher, wound up and threw. Before Nap's worried eyes, a little swish of white catapulted over the plate. The umpire jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. "Strike one!" he said. And Nap had barely seen that ball. No, he could never hit it out.Bonner pitched again. It was a ball this time, purposely wide of the plate—a coaxer. Nap stood like a statue."Ball one!"A third time the pitcher wound up and threw. A third time Nap did not offer at the ball."Strike two!"On the bases, the runners took swift leads with each lift of the pitcher's arm, scurrying back like scared rats as the ball thudded into the catcher's glove. They were curiously silent. Nobody shouted for him to hit it; each of the three, Nap knew, was afraid he would. Like him, they feared a double or triple play might result. After all, if he stood there and allowed the third strike to be called, it would be better than forcing some runner.He shook himself angrily. How far would Napoleon have gone if he had chosen to wait impotently? His first rule of warfare was, "Time is everything." At the thought, Nap gripped the bat more firmly, edging closer to the plate. And then, quite accidentally, he caught the signal that passed from runner to runner—the quick lifting of a finger that meant "Steal!"Almost before he could realize that Bunny and the rest had conceded his inability to help in this crisis, and had determined on the desperate expedient of a triple steal, the Belden pitcher was preparing for his last delivery. Nap watched the wind-up with set, fascinated eyes. It was like a snake coiling to strike.Before the circling arm had completed its queer gyrations, each runner was in action. Nap saw the pitcher's smile freeze suddenly. Like a gun discharged at half-cock, the ball leaped from his hand and came whistling toward the batter. In that tick of a second before it reached the plate, Nap found himself.He could not swing and hit it. To try that would be utterly futile. Moreover, Bi could never reach home before the catcher had clamped the ball on him. But there was one thing Nap could do. Gripping his bat loosely, he held it stiffly before him, squarely in the path of the pitch. Ball sogged against wood and bounced back into the diamond. At the sound of the impact, Nap raced for first.Not till he had reached the base safely, and run beyondit and turned to the right to come back, did he know what had happened. The little bunt had proved so totally unexpected that the Belden players were caught flat-footed. Bi scored. The pitcher, scooping up the ball, shot it toward third, in an attempt to catch Bunny. It was a bad throw, low and to one side, and the guardian of that sack did well to cuff it as it passed, checking its momentum enough to stop it a dozen feet beyond the base line.Without hesitating, Bunny followed Bi to the plate, scoring on his very heels. S. S. quick to take advantage of the break of luck, scampered to third. The runs were over, and there were still two on bases, with nobody out.But here, unfortunately, Lakeville reached the hopeless end of its batting list. Bonfire popped up an easy foul. Prissler—well, Prissler fanned ignominiously, just as everybody expected he would. Prissler was no ball player. And Specs' best was a liner straight to the shortstop.In spite of these minor mishaps, Nap sauntered out to center field with a song on his lips. Twice in that one inning, by tactics comparable to Napoleon's best strategy, he had helped the team. What was it the little Corsican had said after recapturing Italy? "A few more events"—yes, that was it—"a few more events like this campaign, and I shall perhaps go down to posterity." Nap crimsoned guilty at the inference; just the same, his chin shot out pugnaciously.Give him another chance, and he would wind up this ball game "with a clap of thunder."But with that one big inning ended Nap's opportunities. Not another ball was batted to center field; not once, in the innings that followed, was Nap on base. It was hard to remain inactive, like—like being weighed down by a leaden mantle; but the memory of the trapped ball and the squeeze play was quite enough to warrant his remarking occasionally to himself, "This is my lucky day."The score:Innings123456789Belden00Lakeville02Substitute No. 2S. S. Zane wanted to help win that game. In the last half of the third inning, when Jump dumped a Texas-leaguer into the outfield and perched proudly on first, S. S. ran out to the coaching line."Take a lead!" he called shrilly. "Down with his arm, ol' boy! Watch him! Watch him!—Slide!—Nice work! He'll throw it away yet. He's no pitcher! See, he's scared green! Make him pitch, Mr. Umpire! Cowardy-calf! I tell you, Jump, he's got a yellow streak! He—""S. S.!" It was Bunny's crisp voice.The coacher turned. At the crooking of his captain's finger, he walked back to the bench. "What's the matter?""You are supposed to be coaching the runner," Bunny told him quietly. "That doesn't mean jeering at the pitcher. We don't play that kind of game."S. S. hung his head. "I—I'm sorry, Bunny. I wasn't trying to rattle him. I just forgot what I was saying, I guess."There the incident ended. Bunny went out to the coaching box himself, and devoted his attention wholly to Jump. Back on the bench, S. S. swallowed hard."I didn't mean anything," he told himself gloomily. "But Bunny's right, of course. Coaching that way isn't good sportsmanship." He eyed the Belden pitcher. "Wonder how I can make it up to Bonner."The opportunity came in the very next inning. Lakeville failed to score in the third, and the Belden team came piling in for the first of the fourth.It began disastrously for Lakeville. There was a patter of hits and an appalling total of errors. The first batter shot a stinging liner just inside third, which eluded S. S. altogether. The next flied to short right field, and Prissler lost the ball in the sun. Then Bonfire allowed a grounder to escape between his legs. Jump bobbled an easy chance. Roundy dropped a perfect throw. Specs sailed a ball ten feet over first on an attempted put-out. Before Lakeville could settle down to the grim business of retiring the side,three runs were over the plate, and the bases were still full.When Bunny fanned the next two batters, S. S. was elated, but not particularly surprised. He knew his captain was at his best in a pinch, and he said as much to the Belden runner on third, who happened to be Bonner, the opposing pitcher.If this were a diplomatic effort to make friends with Bonner by starting a conversation, it failed dismally. The boy merely nodded, without saying anything at all, and immediately proceeded to edge his way off the base toward home. S. S. covered his embarrassment by slapping his bare hand into the palm of his glove.What happened next was wholly unplanned.There was no guile in the heart of the neatest Scout of the Black Eagle Patrol. When he saw that the Belden pitcher's shoestring was loose and dangling, he called attention to it in the most matter-of-fact, good-turn way in the world; and when Bonner glanced down, standing a few feet off third base, and Bunny suddenly snapped the ball to S. S., the latter caught it mechanically and tagged the runner before he could scramble back to safety, solely and simply because baseball instinct told him that was the thing to do.But it was the third out. It nipped a promising rally. And it had all the earmarks of a carefully planned trick. Bonner looked at S. S. just once, withsuch scorn in his steel-blue eyes that S. S. wished with all his heart the earth might open up then and there and swallow him from sight.But he did not abandon his ambition. Sooner or later, he would prove to that fellow that he could play real ball, and that he was not the kind who resorted to questionable tactics to win a point.The last half of the fourth inning was uneventful. Only three Lakeville batters faced the pitcher—Nap, Bonfire, and Prissler; and, as S. S. confided to Bi, nobody could expect them to do anything. They justified his expectations in every way by fanning unanimously.Belden threatened again in the fifth inning. With runners on second and first, and one out, the Lakeville infield played close, to shut off a run at home. As luck would have it, the batter lashed a stinging grounder toward S. S.It was a hard hit ball, that even Sheffield, Lakeville's regular third baseman, would have done well to knock down, much less to field cleanly for an out. S. S. missed it altogether. Under the circumstances, this was a pardonable error. But his sudden leap, backward and to one side, which threatened a collision with the Belden runner coming from second, made the play look bad.The runner halted instinctively for a fatal moment. S. S., now between him and the plate, lunged awkwardly for the ball, without getting his hands anywherenear it, and it shot between his legs against the Belden boy."Out!" boomed the umpire; "hit by batted ball."The Belden coacher on third clucked, just clucked. He did not say a single word. But when S. S. identified him as Bonner, whom he had already twice offended, he realized what the boy was thinking. And it was ridiculously wrong! S. S. had not missed the grounder deliberately; he had tried with all his scant skill to get his hands on the ball.What was the use, anyhow?S. S. did not bat in the last half of the fifth, which proved a quick inning. There was a caught fly, a screaming single that kindled hope, and a fast double play that snuffed it as abruptly as it had flamed. Then Belden came to bat again.Bunny disposed of the first two batters by forcing them to hit weak flies to the infield, but the third lined far out to right, and pulled up at third before Prissler retrieved the ball. Playing deep for the next batter, S. S. saw the Belden captain stroll up to the plate, grinning cheerfully. He hoped with all his heart that Bunny would fan him; if he did, S. S. resolved to take revenge for Bonner's implied insults by making some casual remark about the way not to hit 'em out. He was beginning to hate that complacent, smiling youngster.As S. S. waited for Bunny to pitch, his keen eyes, trained to observe by scoutcraft, detected somethingthat made him chuckle outright. The bat which Bonner was waving belligerently over the plate was the same one Bunny had used in the preceding inning, when he hit into a double play. At the time, S. S. had marveled at the weak grounder his usually reliable captain dribbled to the shortstop's waiting hands, and he had found the answer in the broken bat, which had cracked in its impact against the ball. And now, blissfully ignorant of the defect, Mister Blue Eyes expected to drive in a run with that decrepit bit of ash. Why, he couldn't hit it out of the diamond in a thousand years!Bunny pitched a ball just wide of the plate. The batter eyed it without swinging.S. S. chuckled again. But suddenly, without any reason at all, the gurgle died in his throat. Something stronger than his own desire seemed to yank him out of himself, and words that came quite without bidding formed on his lips and were spoken."Hi, Bonner!" they said to the boy at the plate. "That bat's busted."The Belden captain lifted a wary head. He was clearly suspicious of some fresh trick, and he never took his eyes off Bunny. S. S. guessed he expected a strike might be sneaked over if he turned away. But when Bunny waited politely, the boy banged the end of the bat against the plate. It rang hollowly, and he promptly discarded it for another.In another minute, when S. S. saw the groundercome zipping toward him, he wondered why on earth he had warned the batter. This hit ball was going to be hard to handle. But he set himself, with legs close together this time, and waited for it to reach him. He even had time to judge its speed, and to follow its course through grass and dust, and to decide that he could get the runner at home. He glowed with confidence.Just at the last, though, the ball hit a pebble and bounced high over his head. With a frantic upward fling of his gloved hand, S. S. speared it neatly. But the unbraced feet and the chug of the ball were too much for his balance. He toppled over backward, and sat down with a pronounced thump.It was clearly too late to throw across the diamond to first. If the play were to be made at all, it must be at home; and S. S. realized in a flash that by the time he came to his feet and threw, the runner would have scored. There was just one thing to do, and he did it. Still sitting awkwardly on the ground, he drew back his arm and shot the ball with all his might to the waiting Bi.The runner slid. But good, old reliable Bi Jones, straddling the plate, took the perfect throw and clamped the ball on him a long ways from the rubber—oh, a good three or four inches, S. S. decided. He nodded at the umpire's decision. The fellow was out, of course; S. S. knew it all the time.Coming in to the bench, he passed Bonner, whowas grinning a little wryly. "Thanks," the Belden captain said to S. S."For what?" snapped Zane, quickly on the defensive."Why, for telling me the bat was broken. I liked that. You didn't suppose I was thanking you for throwing out Clark at home, did you? That was a dandy play, let me tell you, even if it was against us; yes, sir, as pretty a stop and throw as I ever saw."S. S.'s face glowed like a full moon. "Oh, it wasn't much," he said carelessly.But it was. He knew it was. So was the warning about the bat. He had helped save the game, and he had proved to the doubting Bonner that he was a good sportsman. He liked that laughing, blue-eyed, freckle-faced boy; he wished he would move to Lakeville.The score:Innings123456789Belden000300Lakeville02000Substitute No. 3Prissler, at the tail-end of the batting list, had already struck out twice, and he expected to do it again when he faced the Belden pitcher in the last half of the sixth inning. Instead, he walked on four balls.Somehow, it did not seem quite fair. He had donenothing to deserve the honor of being a base runner, and he felt a little sorry that the rules permitted him to profit by the pitcher's wildness. He was on first, precisely as he would have been after hitting safely. Yet he had made no hit; had not the skill, indeed, to make one. In some unaccountable manner, he had gained an advantage he did not deserve.Prissler had batted first in that inning. Specs, up next, flied out. Jump fanned. There were now two out, with Bunny at bat.After allowing the first pitched ball to sing past without offering at it, Bunny met the second squarely. At the crack of the bat, Prissler dashed for second."It's a homer!" shrieked Specs excitedly. He was coaching off third. "Come on, Prissy! Come on!"Both the shortstop and the second baseman were facing the outfield, watching the soaring ball. Prissler touched the bag and wheeled toward third. At that corner of the diamond, Specs was executing a war-dance, with wildly swinging arms."Go on in, Prissy!" he yelled, waving him toward home. "Come on, Bunny! Come on!"Prissler crossed the plate standing up. Bunny, close behind, flung himself toward the white rubber in a headlong slide. It was nip and tuck between ball and runner, but the latter beat the throw by inches."—safe!" came the tag of the umpire's decision. At the word, Prissler experienced an irresistible desire to turn a somersault; and did it, moreover, to the profoundamazement of the Lakeville team, which had never seen him so undignified before.But it was excusable. Not only had the Lakeville boys tied the score, but they were now leading by one run.After the decision, the Belden catcher straightened up, with the ball resting in his big glove. He wrapped the fingers of his right hand about it, and drew back his arm for the throw to his pitcher. Then, as if changing his mind, he shot it to the third baseman, who caught it and stamped a decisive foot upon the sack.The umpire shook his head. Prissler, watching the pantomime, wrinkled his brow. He wondered what it all meant."But I tell you he didn't," the third baseman said angrily. "That first runner didn't touch the bag at all. He cut across 'way out there."Again the umpire shook his head.Now Prissler began to understand. They were claiming he had failed to touch third before starting for home. He tried to remember. He had been running from second, toward Specs, who had waved him to keep on. He had answered the signal by turning in the direction of the plate and—"He is right," Prissler told the umpire suddenly. "Ididcut across the corner of the diamond without touching third."He could not understand the stunned silence thatfollowed. Specs' jaw dropped in consternation. One of the other fellows coughed unnaturally. In the eyes of the two or three Belden players within hearing grew a queer light of grudging admiration. With an effort, the umpire found his voice."Runner is out at third," he ruled.So, after all, the two runs did not count. Technically, Bunny's long hit could be scored as only a two-bagger, although he had circled the bases before the ball could be relayed home. Moreover, the inning was over.The seventh began badly. Perhaps Bunny was still winded; perhaps the disappointment kept him from pitching his best. Whatever the reason, the first two batters hit safely, the third advanced them with a neat sacrifice bunt, and only Jump's bare-handed catch of a liner prevented immediate scoring. Then, in his eagerness to keep the ball out of the groove, Bunny walked another, filling the bases, with two out.In right field, Prissler stooped nervously and plucked a blade of grass. Without quite understanding why, he felt he was indirectly to blame for the threatening situation. It dated back to that play at third, upon which the umpire had reversed his decision."But I was out fairly," Prissler told himself wonderingly, kicking at a tuft of roots. "I couldn't say anything else, could I?"He looked up just in time to see the Belden batterswing viciously against a pitched ball. It was a low fly, and it lifted straight toward right field.In his first flurry of indecision, Prissler stood stock-still, thereby proving himself a poor fielder. Any expert player would have been upon his toes and away before the crash of meeting bat and ball had dwindled to an echo; for it was obvious that the fly must fall in short right field, just beyond reach of the second baseman.But Prissler's tardy recognition of this fact was only momentary. In another instant, he was in action, racing with all his might toward the falling ball, and noting, out of the corner of his eye, that the Belden runners were circling the bases like some human merry-go-round. If he missed the catch, at least three runs would score.But it looked impossible. The ball was falling like a plummet, well out of reach of his extended hands. He pumped his legs desperately. Bunny might have made it in time, or Specs, or some of those other fellows who had the knack of sprinting. He was afraid he couldn't.With only a tantalizing step or two to cover, Prissler saw that the ball was nearly level with his eyes. He threw himself forward, in a very frenzy of determination. He felt himself falling. But he never took his eyes from that white comet. As he plunged to the earth, in a great welter of dust, his hands thrust forth spasmodically.Something drove hard against his glove, slapping it to the ground. Instinctively, his left hand leaped to cover the precious ball. A shoulder hit wrenchingly, toppling him over in a curious tumble, from which he recovered with astonishing agility, coming to his feet like some jack-in-the-box, and trotting on into the diamond, with the ball held proudly aloft.Instantly, there grew a confusion of shouts."He didn't catch it!""Trapped it; that's what he did!""No, he didn't, either!""Certainly, he did!"Prissler smiled. He knew. He looked at the umpire for confirmation. But the official was standing there motionless, with a questioning expression on his face that said, as plainly as words, "I don't know whether the ball was trapped or caught." Prissler seemed to go cold all over.But the umpire was a very wise man. He looked the boy straight in the eyes."Did you catch it?" he asked."Yes, sir," said Prissler, "I did. I caught it fair and square.""Batter is out!" declared the umpire, with just a hint of defiance in his voice. He expected a volley of protest.The Belden third baseman looked at the Belden catcher, and they both looked at their blue-eyed, freckle-faced captain. Each one remembered theother play in which Prissler had figured. To their credit, be it said all three smiled bravely in the face of their bitter disappointment."If he says he caught it," the Belden captain nodded soberly, "we know he did." The catcher and the third baseman agreed. Not a single Belden player questioned the evidence.This decision, when you come to think it over, was about as splendid a tribute to the honesty of a player as baseball history records. But Prissler saw nothing remarkable about it. He had caught the ball, and it was no more than fair that the batter should be called out. What pleased him most was the fact that the runs which had crowded over the plate did not count.The score:Innings123456789Belden0003000Lakeville020000Substitute No. 4Long before the spectacular ninth inning, you might have thought Bonfire Cree had done his share. To him Bunny was indebted for many pitching hints: this Belden batter could not hit a ball around his knees; this one was dazed by speed; this one crowded the plate and must be driven back by in-curves; this one swung awkwardly at shoulder-high pitches. Moreover,he had solved a certain sequence of deliveries by the Belden twirler. Perhaps Bonner himself was unconscious of any order in his pitches, but he began always with a coaxer, a little wide of the plate, following it with a straight, fast ball, squarely in the groove, and then with either an out or an in curve. Quite naturally, this knowledge gave the batter an advantage.All this aided greatly; but still Bonfire was not satisfied. He might have observed and tabulated these facts from the bench. They had nothing to do with his own playing; and through eight long innings, he had failed to distinguish himself at bat or in the field.Just before the ninth inning began, with the score still 3-2 in Belden's favor, he turned to Bunny. "I am like a coach who never made the team," he said, smiling a little wistfully. "I tell the others what to do and how to do it; but I can't seem to use the information for my own good.""Never mind," consoled Bunny. "You've helped as much as the best player on the team. It looks bad now, I'll admit, but maybe we can stage a rally in the last of the ninth."Now, accidents will happen with the best of regulated batters. After Bunny had fanned the boy who could not hit a ball around his knees by feeding him nothing else, and added a second strike-out to his credit by scorching three sizzling pitches to the one who was not on batting terms with speed, the next fellow, who crowded the plate, upset all precedent by takingone backward step and meeting an inshoot flush on the nose.The minute the ball was hit, Bonfire groaned. "That's good for three bases," he said positively, without even turning to watch its flight over right field.Prissler chased dutifully after the ball, but it was far over his head. The best fielder in the world could never have reached it in time, and Prissler laid no claims to that title. Before he could pick it up, after it had rolled nearly to the fence, and line it to Jump, via a relay to S. S., the runner was squatting comfortably on third."Well! Well!" shouted some Belden fan who thought he was funny. "There goes your old ball game. Look who's up now—'Home-run' Hogan!"The batter was squat and broad of shoulder. Already he was credited with three hits in this game, and Bonfire had confessed to Bunny that he seemed to have no weakness."You just pitch to him," he had laughed, "and then throw up your hands to keep from getting hit by what he slams back at you."Bunny measured this dangerous opponent a long time before he pitched. But when he finally shot over the first delivery, it was a clean strike. Out in left field, Bonfire nodded approvingly."No use to pass him," he agreed. "That Beldencaptain, Bonner, who is up next, is nearly as dangerous. No, the play is to make Hogan hit to save fielder." Aloud he called, "Get him, Bunny!"Hogan watched disdainfully as the second pitch zipped past, wide of the plate. You couldn't fool that fellow. But the third, waist-high, straight over, was exactly to his liking. With a hunch of his powerful shoulders, he swung his mighty bludgeon of a bat hard against the ball.It was a fly to left field, as long as the one that had baffled Prissler a moment before, but much higher. At the crack of the bat, Bonfire wheeled abruptly and began to run, picking a little tuft of grass, yards and yards away, as the target toward which the ball was speeding.Head down, arms chugging, he ran as he had never run before. Even so, his hope of smothering the fly seemed utterly forlorn. In the first place, he was not a great sprinter; he probably could not reach it in time. But granting that his legs carried him over the ground fast enough, he had not gauged the course of the ball with his eyes; he could never hope to turn at the last instant, and find the falling ball in his very path. The Belden fans jeered his amateurish efforts, and shouted encouragement to the circling Hogan.As he lifted a foot to plump it down on the little tuft of grass, Bonfire jerked his head around and flung up his hands. Into them, as accurately as if he had been watching it from the first, dropped the ball. Hehad made the catch over his left shoulder, almost at his neck.At first, the Belden fans were disgruntled. "Horseshoes!" yelled one in disgust; and, "You lucky fish!" wailed another. But, in the end, they applauded the wonderful play.In a way, of course, as Bonfire readily admitted to himself, it was luck: the same type of luck that makes a pitcher fling up a gloved hand to shield his face from a screaming liner, only to have the ball hit his palm and stick there. But it was something more than mere luck in Bonfire's case; it was the result of a whole season of observation and experiment.The secret of the catch was buried deep in the boy's peculiarly inquisitive and analytic mind.Big-league fielders did not wait till the ball was high in the air before running to get under it. At the crack of the bat, they were off. In the few professional games Bonfire had seen, he decided these star fielders estimated the force of the drive from the sound of crashing wood and horsehide, and the direction from the first glimpse of the rising ball. It was a knack of determining the spot where the fly would land; a kind of baseball instinct that could be developed only by infinite patience and observation.At the beginning of the Lakeville season, Bonfire set himself the stint of training his eyes and ears. Day after day, while the nine practiced or played games, he tested his own powers. Sometimes he sat on thebench, alert to hear and see; sometimes he wandered out toward the fielders. But always, when a fly was hit, his ear registered the crack of the flailing bat, and his eye followed the ascending ball. Then, abruptly, he turned away. It would fall on that spot, he guessed, picking a target in the outfield; or there; or there. At first, naturally, he was often yards and yards astray in his calculations; but as the season waned, with no lessening of his tense study, he came gradually to guessing closer and closer, till finally the accuracy of his snap decisions was almost uncanny."Bonfire," beamed Bunny happily, slapping the hero of the play on his back, after the Lakeville team had come in for the last of the ninth inning, "that was the most wonderful catch I ever saw. Honest, it was. I didn't know you had it in you. Why didn't you try for the team this spring?"Bonfire stared at him quizzically. "Too big a coward, maybe," he said. "I was such a dub in track events and football and basketball and in baseball, too—last fall, I mean—that I didn't want to run the risk of being jeered and laughed at any more. Next season—" He allowed the sentence to remain unfinished, but his quick smile was more a promise than any words could have been.With Belden leading by one run, and the game almost over, Lakeville began the ninth inning with a do-or-die energy. Roundy, up first, singled cleanly. Ordinarily, that hit would have stirred the team intoecstasies; now it called forth only a few half-hearted cheers. For Roundy was the last regular player on the batting list. After him, as Specs put it tersely, came nothing. "Nothing", in this case, meant the four substitutes.Nap fouled out to the catcher. S. S. fanned; he always fanned, it seemed; if he had done anything else, the others would have thought it the end of the world. This brought Bonfire to bat, which is only another way of saying that the game was apparently lost; for every player on the Lakeville bench recalled his ludicrous attempts to connect with the ball when they had tested him at Molly's picnic.But Bonfire was undismayed. Accidents might happen. Hadn't he knocked a home run that first day of school? And hadn't he studied batting as assiduously as he had studied fielding through the long season?He knew how to grip his bat, six or eight inches from the knob, and how to take a choppy swing with his wrists, body and arms, stepping forward and sidewise to meet the ball. His older brother, who was something of a celebrity in college baseball, had drilled him in these technical points. During almost the whole of the Christmas holidays, when Bonfire had visited him, the two had repaired to the baseball cage of the college gymnasium; big brother pitching and explaining, little brother batting and—more and more frequently as they progressed—hitting. Later in thespring, two other loyal friends, sworn to secrecy, had thrown and thrown to him in the seclusion of the Cree backyard. At the outset, as in the fielding stunt, he had been chagrined over his failures. Little Jimmy White had fanned him; Molly Sefton had fanned him. But the time came when neither could fool him, when his bat lashed hard and true against their best offerings.It was with these memories in mind that Bonfire stood facing the Belden pitcher. In the earlier innings, he had flied out once, walked twice, and missed a twisting third strike on his other trip to the plate. Bonner had him tabbed as a weakling with the bat; even his own team mates did not expect him to hit. Bonfire's lips set in a straight, firm line.He waited unmoving as the first ball sped past. It was the usual coaxer, a bit wide of the plate. But when the pitcher wound up again, Bonfire braced himself, breathing quickly. The straight, fast ball was due."I'm going to hit it," he told himself in a matter-of-fact way. "I'm going to hit it—hard."The pitch began. From the coil of whirling arms, the ball leaped toward the plate. At the same instant, Bonfire tensed the muscles of his arms and began the swing of his body. Ball and bat met exactly above the center of the plate."Over left-fielder's head," Bonfire exulted, trained ears and eyes determining the end of that parabola to be marked by the soaring ball, half liner, half fly. "Two-bagger, sure; maybe three."He rounded first at full speed. Ahead of him somewhere, Roundy was tearing around the bases. A coacher waved excited arms to Bonfire. "Go on!" he shrieked. "Keep going!"Just before his leg hit the sack at second, Bonfire stole a glance toward left field. The ball was rolling along the ground now, far beyond a youth who was frantically chasing after it. Bonfire swept on to third.Roundy scored. Bunny, coaching off third, was threshing his arms wildly toward home, as if he were intent upon sweeping the runner over the plate. "Go on, Bonfire!" he yelled. "You can make it!"Legs pounding like flying piston rods, Bonfire began the last lap of his race against the ball. For half the distance between third and home, he ran without hearing a sound from the Belden fans. The silence spurred him on. But suddenly they waked into rustling hope. The ball was coming in. They murmured. They rumbled. They roared. They thundered like madmen. High above the din, Bonfire caught Specs' excited treble."Slide!" the voice vibrated. "Slide!"Bonfire threw himself forward in a magnificent headlong dive. His hand ploughed toward the plate. Pebbles scratched his palm. Dust swirled up in clouds. And then, as his groping fingers found the cool rubber, he heard a thud above him, and the catcher clamped the ball hard on his protruding arm.Bonfire leaped to his feet. The play had been close,very close. For an instant, he could see nothing but a cloud of dust. But as it cleared, his eyes found the umpire.The man was leaning forward, arms flung wide, palms down. And he was saying, "Runner is safe!"Lakeville had won the game and the State interscholastic baseball championship,—Lakeville and its substitutes.The score:Innings123456789TotalBelden0003000003Lakeville0200000024
SUBSTITUTES' DAY
A gong clanged. The umpire brushed off home plate with his little whisk broom. When he turned to face the stands, the fans stilled expectantly.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "the batteries for to-day's game are: for Lakeville, Payton and Jones; for Belden, Bonner and Clark."
Substitute No. 1
Out in center field, Nap Meeker looked up at the blue sky and said, very solemnly, "This is my lucky day." More than one hundred years before, history has it, the little Corsican for whom Nap was nicknamed went forth to battle with these same words on his lips. To both boy and soldier, perhaps, they marked the summoning of courage for what was to come.
For Nap dreaded the impending game. He had little skill as a player, and none knew it better than himself. This afternoon, for example, he would much have preferred to bury his nose in some unread biography of Napoleon, and live for an hour or morein those stirring times when ambition and accomplishment vaulted straight to a throne.
But he had accepted the challenge to play. As a Boy Scout, he could do no less. Loyalty to his leader, to the team, and to the school, were in his mind as inflexible as must have been the loyalty of Napoleon's soldiers to their leader in those other days. Nor was that the limit of Nap's resolution. If he were to play at all, he must actually help to make victory possible. He must offset his lack of technical skill with strategy. He must out-guess, out-plan, out-general the opposing team. For hadn't his hero once said that most battles were won in the council room, before a shot was fired?
As a result of the toss, which Bunny had won, Belden batted first. Nap shuffled about nervously as the Lakeville captain took his three practice pitches and Bi shot the last ball to Jump, on second, who swooped low to tag an imaginary runner. Then the umpire lifted his hand. "Play ball!" he said; and the game was on.
It was hard for Nap to remain inactive during the first half of that initial inning. He wished he were a star pitcher, like Bunny, with the balance of each play hinging upon his delivery; failing that, he even found himself hoping a fly ball might come sailing to him. But nothing happened to test his mettle. The first Belden batter fanned on three pitched balls; the second fouled to Bi, who calmly slipped off his mask andsmothered the little pop-up without moving from his tracks; the third grounded out to Roundy, who made the play unassisted. Then Nap trotted in from the field, only to watch Specs, Jump and Bunny retired in one-two-three order. He trotted back to center field again. In a way, he began to understand what Napoleon meant when, with the war raging elsewhere, he chafed in the city and said, "Paris weighs on me like a leaden mantle."
But in the second inning, opportunity beckoned to Nap. A Belden batter shot a stinging grass-clipper straight at S. S., and that youth allowed it to trickle between his legs. The next batter flied over second. With the cry, "Let me have it!" Nap came charging in for the catch.
It was not a difficult ball to handle. Jump might have backed under it easily. But Jump's play just then, with a runner on first, was to guard the keystone sack. All this Nap sensed in an instant; all this—and something more.
The batter was merely trotting toward first. He had no hope of an error; he could already see the play reported, "Flied out to center field." But Nap, racing toward the falling ball, was fairly quivering with the hope of a strategy that filled his heart to bursting.
He was under the fly now. He lifted his hands for the catch, stealing a final glance to assure himself that the batter was still only half way to first; then, abruptly, he took one backward step, allowed the ballto hit the ground, caught it as it bounced, and shot it unerringly to Jump.
There was no need of shouting a warning to Jump. He was baseball wise. He knew what to do. Plumping one foot on the bag, and thus forcing the runner who had been on first, he whipped the ball to Roundy for the second put-out, before the astonished batter could galvanize his legs enough to beat the throw. Nap had out-witted batter and runner. There were now two out, with nobody on base.
All the Scouts cheered. Bunny shouted some unintelligible word of thanks and congratulation, accompanied by a broad grin. Stalking back to his position in deep center field, Nap said softly to himself, "I'm glad I did it if it pleases him." Perhaps this was some hazy recollection of Napoleon's message to Josephine. "I prize victory," he had written, "since it pleases you."
The last Belden batter that inning swung at three wide balls without ticking a foul.
For Lakeville, the last half of the second began well. Bi laced a clean single over short. Roundy laid down a perfect bunt, and beat out the throw to first. S. S. walked on four balls. And it was in this tense situation, bases full and nobody out, that Nap came to bat for the first time.
Just at that moment, he would have given a million dollars for the skill to lash out a long hit. But he knew, deep down in his heart, that he could never doit. Agonizing recollections of his usual attempts, resulting in feeble grounders to some waiting fielder, seared his mind. Already he could foresee the havoc he might create. In all probability, he would bat into a double or even a triple play, that would wipe clean the bases, like some remorseless scythe.
His hands slipped up on the handle of the bat. Bonner, the Belden pitcher, wound up and threw. Before Nap's worried eyes, a little swish of white catapulted over the plate. The umpire jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. "Strike one!" he said. And Nap had barely seen that ball. No, he could never hit it out.
Bonner pitched again. It was a ball this time, purposely wide of the plate—a coaxer. Nap stood like a statue.
"Ball one!"
A third time the pitcher wound up and threw. A third time Nap did not offer at the ball.
"Strike two!"
On the bases, the runners took swift leads with each lift of the pitcher's arm, scurrying back like scared rats as the ball thudded into the catcher's glove. They were curiously silent. Nobody shouted for him to hit it; each of the three, Nap knew, was afraid he would. Like him, they feared a double or triple play might result. After all, if he stood there and allowed the third strike to be called, it would be better than forcing some runner.
He shook himself angrily. How far would Napoleon have gone if he had chosen to wait impotently? His first rule of warfare was, "Time is everything." At the thought, Nap gripped the bat more firmly, edging closer to the plate. And then, quite accidentally, he caught the signal that passed from runner to runner—the quick lifting of a finger that meant "Steal!"
Almost before he could realize that Bunny and the rest had conceded his inability to help in this crisis, and had determined on the desperate expedient of a triple steal, the Belden pitcher was preparing for his last delivery. Nap watched the wind-up with set, fascinated eyes. It was like a snake coiling to strike.
Before the circling arm had completed its queer gyrations, each runner was in action. Nap saw the pitcher's smile freeze suddenly. Like a gun discharged at half-cock, the ball leaped from his hand and came whistling toward the batter. In that tick of a second before it reached the plate, Nap found himself.
He could not swing and hit it. To try that would be utterly futile. Moreover, Bi could never reach home before the catcher had clamped the ball on him. But there was one thing Nap could do. Gripping his bat loosely, he held it stiffly before him, squarely in the path of the pitch. Ball sogged against wood and bounced back into the diamond. At the sound of the impact, Nap raced for first.
Not till he had reached the base safely, and run beyondit and turned to the right to come back, did he know what had happened. The little bunt had proved so totally unexpected that the Belden players were caught flat-footed. Bi scored. The pitcher, scooping up the ball, shot it toward third, in an attempt to catch Bunny. It was a bad throw, low and to one side, and the guardian of that sack did well to cuff it as it passed, checking its momentum enough to stop it a dozen feet beyond the base line.
Without hesitating, Bunny followed Bi to the plate, scoring on his very heels. S. S. quick to take advantage of the break of luck, scampered to third. The runs were over, and there were still two on bases, with nobody out.
But here, unfortunately, Lakeville reached the hopeless end of its batting list. Bonfire popped up an easy foul. Prissler—well, Prissler fanned ignominiously, just as everybody expected he would. Prissler was no ball player. And Specs' best was a liner straight to the shortstop.
In spite of these minor mishaps, Nap sauntered out to center field with a song on his lips. Twice in that one inning, by tactics comparable to Napoleon's best strategy, he had helped the team. What was it the little Corsican had said after recapturing Italy? "A few more events"—yes, that was it—"a few more events like this campaign, and I shall perhaps go down to posterity." Nap crimsoned guilty at the inference; just the same, his chin shot out pugnaciously.Give him another chance, and he would wind up this ball game "with a clap of thunder."
But with that one big inning ended Nap's opportunities. Not another ball was batted to center field; not once, in the innings that followed, was Nap on base. It was hard to remain inactive, like—like being weighed down by a leaden mantle; but the memory of the trapped ball and the squeeze play was quite enough to warrant his remarking occasionally to himself, "This is my lucky day."
The score:
Innings123456789Belden00Lakeville02
Substitute No. 2
S. S. Zane wanted to help win that game. In the last half of the third inning, when Jump dumped a Texas-leaguer into the outfield and perched proudly on first, S. S. ran out to the coaching line.
"Take a lead!" he called shrilly. "Down with his arm, ol' boy! Watch him! Watch him!—Slide!—Nice work! He'll throw it away yet. He's no pitcher! See, he's scared green! Make him pitch, Mr. Umpire! Cowardy-calf! I tell you, Jump, he's got a yellow streak! He—"
"S. S.!" It was Bunny's crisp voice.
The coacher turned. At the crooking of his captain's finger, he walked back to the bench. "What's the matter?"
"You are supposed to be coaching the runner," Bunny told him quietly. "That doesn't mean jeering at the pitcher. We don't play that kind of game."
S. S. hung his head. "I—I'm sorry, Bunny. I wasn't trying to rattle him. I just forgot what I was saying, I guess."
There the incident ended. Bunny went out to the coaching box himself, and devoted his attention wholly to Jump. Back on the bench, S. S. swallowed hard.
"I didn't mean anything," he told himself gloomily. "But Bunny's right, of course. Coaching that way isn't good sportsmanship." He eyed the Belden pitcher. "Wonder how I can make it up to Bonner."
The opportunity came in the very next inning. Lakeville failed to score in the third, and the Belden team came piling in for the first of the fourth.
It began disastrously for Lakeville. There was a patter of hits and an appalling total of errors. The first batter shot a stinging liner just inside third, which eluded S. S. altogether. The next flied to short right field, and Prissler lost the ball in the sun. Then Bonfire allowed a grounder to escape between his legs. Jump bobbled an easy chance. Roundy dropped a perfect throw. Specs sailed a ball ten feet over first on an attempted put-out. Before Lakeville could settle down to the grim business of retiring the side,three runs were over the plate, and the bases were still full.
When Bunny fanned the next two batters, S. S. was elated, but not particularly surprised. He knew his captain was at his best in a pinch, and he said as much to the Belden runner on third, who happened to be Bonner, the opposing pitcher.
If this were a diplomatic effort to make friends with Bonner by starting a conversation, it failed dismally. The boy merely nodded, without saying anything at all, and immediately proceeded to edge his way off the base toward home. S. S. covered his embarrassment by slapping his bare hand into the palm of his glove.
What happened next was wholly unplanned.
There was no guile in the heart of the neatest Scout of the Black Eagle Patrol. When he saw that the Belden pitcher's shoestring was loose and dangling, he called attention to it in the most matter-of-fact, good-turn way in the world; and when Bonner glanced down, standing a few feet off third base, and Bunny suddenly snapped the ball to S. S., the latter caught it mechanically and tagged the runner before he could scramble back to safety, solely and simply because baseball instinct told him that was the thing to do.
But it was the third out. It nipped a promising rally. And it had all the earmarks of a carefully planned trick. Bonner looked at S. S. just once, withsuch scorn in his steel-blue eyes that S. S. wished with all his heart the earth might open up then and there and swallow him from sight.
But he did not abandon his ambition. Sooner or later, he would prove to that fellow that he could play real ball, and that he was not the kind who resorted to questionable tactics to win a point.
The last half of the fourth inning was uneventful. Only three Lakeville batters faced the pitcher—Nap, Bonfire, and Prissler; and, as S. S. confided to Bi, nobody could expect them to do anything. They justified his expectations in every way by fanning unanimously.
Belden threatened again in the fifth inning. With runners on second and first, and one out, the Lakeville infield played close, to shut off a run at home. As luck would have it, the batter lashed a stinging grounder toward S. S.
It was a hard hit ball, that even Sheffield, Lakeville's regular third baseman, would have done well to knock down, much less to field cleanly for an out. S. S. missed it altogether. Under the circumstances, this was a pardonable error. But his sudden leap, backward and to one side, which threatened a collision with the Belden runner coming from second, made the play look bad.
The runner halted instinctively for a fatal moment. S. S., now between him and the plate, lunged awkwardly for the ball, without getting his hands anywherenear it, and it shot between his legs against the Belden boy.
"Out!" boomed the umpire; "hit by batted ball."
The Belden coacher on third clucked, just clucked. He did not say a single word. But when S. S. identified him as Bonner, whom he had already twice offended, he realized what the boy was thinking. And it was ridiculously wrong! S. S. had not missed the grounder deliberately; he had tried with all his scant skill to get his hands on the ball.
What was the use, anyhow?
S. S. did not bat in the last half of the fifth, which proved a quick inning. There was a caught fly, a screaming single that kindled hope, and a fast double play that snuffed it as abruptly as it had flamed. Then Belden came to bat again.
Bunny disposed of the first two batters by forcing them to hit weak flies to the infield, but the third lined far out to right, and pulled up at third before Prissler retrieved the ball. Playing deep for the next batter, S. S. saw the Belden captain stroll up to the plate, grinning cheerfully. He hoped with all his heart that Bunny would fan him; if he did, S. S. resolved to take revenge for Bonner's implied insults by making some casual remark about the way not to hit 'em out. He was beginning to hate that complacent, smiling youngster.
As S. S. waited for Bunny to pitch, his keen eyes, trained to observe by scoutcraft, detected somethingthat made him chuckle outright. The bat which Bonner was waving belligerently over the plate was the same one Bunny had used in the preceding inning, when he hit into a double play. At the time, S. S. had marveled at the weak grounder his usually reliable captain dribbled to the shortstop's waiting hands, and he had found the answer in the broken bat, which had cracked in its impact against the ball. And now, blissfully ignorant of the defect, Mister Blue Eyes expected to drive in a run with that decrepit bit of ash. Why, he couldn't hit it out of the diamond in a thousand years!
Bunny pitched a ball just wide of the plate. The batter eyed it without swinging.
S. S. chuckled again. But suddenly, without any reason at all, the gurgle died in his throat. Something stronger than his own desire seemed to yank him out of himself, and words that came quite without bidding formed on his lips and were spoken.
"Hi, Bonner!" they said to the boy at the plate. "That bat's busted."
The Belden captain lifted a wary head. He was clearly suspicious of some fresh trick, and he never took his eyes off Bunny. S. S. guessed he expected a strike might be sneaked over if he turned away. But when Bunny waited politely, the boy banged the end of the bat against the plate. It rang hollowly, and he promptly discarded it for another.
In another minute, when S. S. saw the groundercome zipping toward him, he wondered why on earth he had warned the batter. This hit ball was going to be hard to handle. But he set himself, with legs close together this time, and waited for it to reach him. He even had time to judge its speed, and to follow its course through grass and dust, and to decide that he could get the runner at home. He glowed with confidence.
Just at the last, though, the ball hit a pebble and bounced high over his head. With a frantic upward fling of his gloved hand, S. S. speared it neatly. But the unbraced feet and the chug of the ball were too much for his balance. He toppled over backward, and sat down with a pronounced thump.
It was clearly too late to throw across the diamond to first. If the play were to be made at all, it must be at home; and S. S. realized in a flash that by the time he came to his feet and threw, the runner would have scored. There was just one thing to do, and he did it. Still sitting awkwardly on the ground, he drew back his arm and shot the ball with all his might to the waiting Bi.
The runner slid. But good, old reliable Bi Jones, straddling the plate, took the perfect throw and clamped the ball on him a long ways from the rubber—oh, a good three or four inches, S. S. decided. He nodded at the umpire's decision. The fellow was out, of course; S. S. knew it all the time.
Coming in to the bench, he passed Bonner, whowas grinning a little wryly. "Thanks," the Belden captain said to S. S.
"For what?" snapped Zane, quickly on the defensive.
"Why, for telling me the bat was broken. I liked that. You didn't suppose I was thanking you for throwing out Clark at home, did you? That was a dandy play, let me tell you, even if it was against us; yes, sir, as pretty a stop and throw as I ever saw."
S. S.'s face glowed like a full moon. "Oh, it wasn't much," he said carelessly.
But it was. He knew it was. So was the warning about the bat. He had helped save the game, and he had proved to the doubting Bonner that he was a good sportsman. He liked that laughing, blue-eyed, freckle-faced boy; he wished he would move to Lakeville.
The score:
Innings123456789Belden000300Lakeville02000
Substitute No. 3
Prissler, at the tail-end of the batting list, had already struck out twice, and he expected to do it again when he faced the Belden pitcher in the last half of the sixth inning. Instead, he walked on four balls.
Somehow, it did not seem quite fair. He had donenothing to deserve the honor of being a base runner, and he felt a little sorry that the rules permitted him to profit by the pitcher's wildness. He was on first, precisely as he would have been after hitting safely. Yet he had made no hit; had not the skill, indeed, to make one. In some unaccountable manner, he had gained an advantage he did not deserve.
Prissler had batted first in that inning. Specs, up next, flied out. Jump fanned. There were now two out, with Bunny at bat.
After allowing the first pitched ball to sing past without offering at it, Bunny met the second squarely. At the crack of the bat, Prissler dashed for second.
"It's a homer!" shrieked Specs excitedly. He was coaching off third. "Come on, Prissy! Come on!"
Both the shortstop and the second baseman were facing the outfield, watching the soaring ball. Prissler touched the bag and wheeled toward third. At that corner of the diamond, Specs was executing a war-dance, with wildly swinging arms.
"Go on in, Prissy!" he yelled, waving him toward home. "Come on, Bunny! Come on!"
Prissler crossed the plate standing up. Bunny, close behind, flung himself toward the white rubber in a headlong slide. It was nip and tuck between ball and runner, but the latter beat the throw by inches.
"—safe!" came the tag of the umpire's decision. At the word, Prissler experienced an irresistible desire to turn a somersault; and did it, moreover, to the profoundamazement of the Lakeville team, which had never seen him so undignified before.
But it was excusable. Not only had the Lakeville boys tied the score, but they were now leading by one run.
After the decision, the Belden catcher straightened up, with the ball resting in his big glove. He wrapped the fingers of his right hand about it, and drew back his arm for the throw to his pitcher. Then, as if changing his mind, he shot it to the third baseman, who caught it and stamped a decisive foot upon the sack.
The umpire shook his head. Prissler, watching the pantomime, wrinkled his brow. He wondered what it all meant.
"But I tell you he didn't," the third baseman said angrily. "That first runner didn't touch the bag at all. He cut across 'way out there."
Again the umpire shook his head.
Now Prissler began to understand. They were claiming he had failed to touch third before starting for home. He tried to remember. He had been running from second, toward Specs, who had waved him to keep on. He had answered the signal by turning in the direction of the plate and—
"He is right," Prissler told the umpire suddenly. "Ididcut across the corner of the diamond without touching third."
He could not understand the stunned silence thatfollowed. Specs' jaw dropped in consternation. One of the other fellows coughed unnaturally. In the eyes of the two or three Belden players within hearing grew a queer light of grudging admiration. With an effort, the umpire found his voice.
"Runner is out at third," he ruled.
So, after all, the two runs did not count. Technically, Bunny's long hit could be scored as only a two-bagger, although he had circled the bases before the ball could be relayed home. Moreover, the inning was over.
The seventh began badly. Perhaps Bunny was still winded; perhaps the disappointment kept him from pitching his best. Whatever the reason, the first two batters hit safely, the third advanced them with a neat sacrifice bunt, and only Jump's bare-handed catch of a liner prevented immediate scoring. Then, in his eagerness to keep the ball out of the groove, Bunny walked another, filling the bases, with two out.
In right field, Prissler stooped nervously and plucked a blade of grass. Without quite understanding why, he felt he was indirectly to blame for the threatening situation. It dated back to that play at third, upon which the umpire had reversed his decision.
"But I was out fairly," Prissler told himself wonderingly, kicking at a tuft of roots. "I couldn't say anything else, could I?"
He looked up just in time to see the Belden batterswing viciously against a pitched ball. It was a low fly, and it lifted straight toward right field.
In his first flurry of indecision, Prissler stood stock-still, thereby proving himself a poor fielder. Any expert player would have been upon his toes and away before the crash of meeting bat and ball had dwindled to an echo; for it was obvious that the fly must fall in short right field, just beyond reach of the second baseman.
But Prissler's tardy recognition of this fact was only momentary. In another instant, he was in action, racing with all his might toward the falling ball, and noting, out of the corner of his eye, that the Belden runners were circling the bases like some human merry-go-round. If he missed the catch, at least three runs would score.
But it looked impossible. The ball was falling like a plummet, well out of reach of his extended hands. He pumped his legs desperately. Bunny might have made it in time, or Specs, or some of those other fellows who had the knack of sprinting. He was afraid he couldn't.
With only a tantalizing step or two to cover, Prissler saw that the ball was nearly level with his eyes. He threw himself forward, in a very frenzy of determination. He felt himself falling. But he never took his eyes from that white comet. As he plunged to the earth, in a great welter of dust, his hands thrust forth spasmodically.
Something drove hard against his glove, slapping it to the ground. Instinctively, his left hand leaped to cover the precious ball. A shoulder hit wrenchingly, toppling him over in a curious tumble, from which he recovered with astonishing agility, coming to his feet like some jack-in-the-box, and trotting on into the diamond, with the ball held proudly aloft.
Instantly, there grew a confusion of shouts.
"He didn't catch it!"
"Trapped it; that's what he did!"
"No, he didn't, either!"
"Certainly, he did!"
Prissler smiled. He knew. He looked at the umpire for confirmation. But the official was standing there motionless, with a questioning expression on his face that said, as plainly as words, "I don't know whether the ball was trapped or caught." Prissler seemed to go cold all over.
But the umpire was a very wise man. He looked the boy straight in the eyes.
"Did you catch it?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," said Prissler, "I did. I caught it fair and square."
"Batter is out!" declared the umpire, with just a hint of defiance in his voice. He expected a volley of protest.
The Belden third baseman looked at the Belden catcher, and they both looked at their blue-eyed, freckle-faced captain. Each one remembered theother play in which Prissler had figured. To their credit, be it said all three smiled bravely in the face of their bitter disappointment.
"If he says he caught it," the Belden captain nodded soberly, "we know he did." The catcher and the third baseman agreed. Not a single Belden player questioned the evidence.
This decision, when you come to think it over, was about as splendid a tribute to the honesty of a player as baseball history records. But Prissler saw nothing remarkable about it. He had caught the ball, and it was no more than fair that the batter should be called out. What pleased him most was the fact that the runs which had crowded over the plate did not count.
The score:
Innings123456789Belden0003000Lakeville020000
Substitute No. 4
Long before the spectacular ninth inning, you might have thought Bonfire Cree had done his share. To him Bunny was indebted for many pitching hints: this Belden batter could not hit a ball around his knees; this one was dazed by speed; this one crowded the plate and must be driven back by in-curves; this one swung awkwardly at shoulder-high pitches. Moreover,he had solved a certain sequence of deliveries by the Belden twirler. Perhaps Bonner himself was unconscious of any order in his pitches, but he began always with a coaxer, a little wide of the plate, following it with a straight, fast ball, squarely in the groove, and then with either an out or an in curve. Quite naturally, this knowledge gave the batter an advantage.
All this aided greatly; but still Bonfire was not satisfied. He might have observed and tabulated these facts from the bench. They had nothing to do with his own playing; and through eight long innings, he had failed to distinguish himself at bat or in the field.
Just before the ninth inning began, with the score still 3-2 in Belden's favor, he turned to Bunny. "I am like a coach who never made the team," he said, smiling a little wistfully. "I tell the others what to do and how to do it; but I can't seem to use the information for my own good."
"Never mind," consoled Bunny. "You've helped as much as the best player on the team. It looks bad now, I'll admit, but maybe we can stage a rally in the last of the ninth."
Now, accidents will happen with the best of regulated batters. After Bunny had fanned the boy who could not hit a ball around his knees by feeding him nothing else, and added a second strike-out to his credit by scorching three sizzling pitches to the one who was not on batting terms with speed, the next fellow, who crowded the plate, upset all precedent by takingone backward step and meeting an inshoot flush on the nose.
The minute the ball was hit, Bonfire groaned. "That's good for three bases," he said positively, without even turning to watch its flight over right field.
Prissler chased dutifully after the ball, but it was far over his head. The best fielder in the world could never have reached it in time, and Prissler laid no claims to that title. Before he could pick it up, after it had rolled nearly to the fence, and line it to Jump, via a relay to S. S., the runner was squatting comfortably on third.
"Well! Well!" shouted some Belden fan who thought he was funny. "There goes your old ball game. Look who's up now—'Home-run' Hogan!"
The batter was squat and broad of shoulder. Already he was credited with three hits in this game, and Bonfire had confessed to Bunny that he seemed to have no weakness.
"You just pitch to him," he had laughed, "and then throw up your hands to keep from getting hit by what he slams back at you."
Bunny measured this dangerous opponent a long time before he pitched. But when he finally shot over the first delivery, it was a clean strike. Out in left field, Bonfire nodded approvingly.
"No use to pass him," he agreed. "That Beldencaptain, Bonner, who is up next, is nearly as dangerous. No, the play is to make Hogan hit to save fielder." Aloud he called, "Get him, Bunny!"
Hogan watched disdainfully as the second pitch zipped past, wide of the plate. You couldn't fool that fellow. But the third, waist-high, straight over, was exactly to his liking. With a hunch of his powerful shoulders, he swung his mighty bludgeon of a bat hard against the ball.
It was a fly to left field, as long as the one that had baffled Prissler a moment before, but much higher. At the crack of the bat, Bonfire wheeled abruptly and began to run, picking a little tuft of grass, yards and yards away, as the target toward which the ball was speeding.
Head down, arms chugging, he ran as he had never run before. Even so, his hope of smothering the fly seemed utterly forlorn. In the first place, he was not a great sprinter; he probably could not reach it in time. But granting that his legs carried him over the ground fast enough, he had not gauged the course of the ball with his eyes; he could never hope to turn at the last instant, and find the falling ball in his very path. The Belden fans jeered his amateurish efforts, and shouted encouragement to the circling Hogan.
As he lifted a foot to plump it down on the little tuft of grass, Bonfire jerked his head around and flung up his hands. Into them, as accurately as if he had been watching it from the first, dropped the ball. Hehad made the catch over his left shoulder, almost at his neck.
At first, the Belden fans were disgruntled. "Horseshoes!" yelled one in disgust; and, "You lucky fish!" wailed another. But, in the end, they applauded the wonderful play.
In a way, of course, as Bonfire readily admitted to himself, it was luck: the same type of luck that makes a pitcher fling up a gloved hand to shield his face from a screaming liner, only to have the ball hit his palm and stick there. But it was something more than mere luck in Bonfire's case; it was the result of a whole season of observation and experiment.
The secret of the catch was buried deep in the boy's peculiarly inquisitive and analytic mind.
Big-league fielders did not wait till the ball was high in the air before running to get under it. At the crack of the bat, they were off. In the few professional games Bonfire had seen, he decided these star fielders estimated the force of the drive from the sound of crashing wood and horsehide, and the direction from the first glimpse of the rising ball. It was a knack of determining the spot where the fly would land; a kind of baseball instinct that could be developed only by infinite patience and observation.
At the beginning of the Lakeville season, Bonfire set himself the stint of training his eyes and ears. Day after day, while the nine practiced or played games, he tested his own powers. Sometimes he sat on thebench, alert to hear and see; sometimes he wandered out toward the fielders. But always, when a fly was hit, his ear registered the crack of the flailing bat, and his eye followed the ascending ball. Then, abruptly, he turned away. It would fall on that spot, he guessed, picking a target in the outfield; or there; or there. At first, naturally, he was often yards and yards astray in his calculations; but as the season waned, with no lessening of his tense study, he came gradually to guessing closer and closer, till finally the accuracy of his snap decisions was almost uncanny.
"Bonfire," beamed Bunny happily, slapping the hero of the play on his back, after the Lakeville team had come in for the last of the ninth inning, "that was the most wonderful catch I ever saw. Honest, it was. I didn't know you had it in you. Why didn't you try for the team this spring?"
Bonfire stared at him quizzically. "Too big a coward, maybe," he said. "I was such a dub in track events and football and basketball and in baseball, too—last fall, I mean—that I didn't want to run the risk of being jeered and laughed at any more. Next season—" He allowed the sentence to remain unfinished, but his quick smile was more a promise than any words could have been.
With Belden leading by one run, and the game almost over, Lakeville began the ninth inning with a do-or-die energy. Roundy, up first, singled cleanly. Ordinarily, that hit would have stirred the team intoecstasies; now it called forth only a few half-hearted cheers. For Roundy was the last regular player on the batting list. After him, as Specs put it tersely, came nothing. "Nothing", in this case, meant the four substitutes.
Nap fouled out to the catcher. S. S. fanned; he always fanned, it seemed; if he had done anything else, the others would have thought it the end of the world. This brought Bonfire to bat, which is only another way of saying that the game was apparently lost; for every player on the Lakeville bench recalled his ludicrous attempts to connect with the ball when they had tested him at Molly's picnic.
But Bonfire was undismayed. Accidents might happen. Hadn't he knocked a home run that first day of school? And hadn't he studied batting as assiduously as he had studied fielding through the long season?
He knew how to grip his bat, six or eight inches from the knob, and how to take a choppy swing with his wrists, body and arms, stepping forward and sidewise to meet the ball. His older brother, who was something of a celebrity in college baseball, had drilled him in these technical points. During almost the whole of the Christmas holidays, when Bonfire had visited him, the two had repaired to the baseball cage of the college gymnasium; big brother pitching and explaining, little brother batting and—more and more frequently as they progressed—hitting. Later in thespring, two other loyal friends, sworn to secrecy, had thrown and thrown to him in the seclusion of the Cree backyard. At the outset, as in the fielding stunt, he had been chagrined over his failures. Little Jimmy White had fanned him; Molly Sefton had fanned him. But the time came when neither could fool him, when his bat lashed hard and true against their best offerings.
It was with these memories in mind that Bonfire stood facing the Belden pitcher. In the earlier innings, he had flied out once, walked twice, and missed a twisting third strike on his other trip to the plate. Bonner had him tabbed as a weakling with the bat; even his own team mates did not expect him to hit. Bonfire's lips set in a straight, firm line.
He waited unmoving as the first ball sped past. It was the usual coaxer, a bit wide of the plate. But when the pitcher wound up again, Bonfire braced himself, breathing quickly. The straight, fast ball was due.
"I'm going to hit it," he told himself in a matter-of-fact way. "I'm going to hit it—hard."
The pitch began. From the coil of whirling arms, the ball leaped toward the plate. At the same instant, Bonfire tensed the muscles of his arms and began the swing of his body. Ball and bat met exactly above the center of the plate.
"Over left-fielder's head," Bonfire exulted, trained ears and eyes determining the end of that parabola to be marked by the soaring ball, half liner, half fly. "Two-bagger, sure; maybe three."
He rounded first at full speed. Ahead of him somewhere, Roundy was tearing around the bases. A coacher waved excited arms to Bonfire. "Go on!" he shrieked. "Keep going!"
Just before his leg hit the sack at second, Bonfire stole a glance toward left field. The ball was rolling along the ground now, far beyond a youth who was frantically chasing after it. Bonfire swept on to third.
Roundy scored. Bunny, coaching off third, was threshing his arms wildly toward home, as if he were intent upon sweeping the runner over the plate. "Go on, Bonfire!" he yelled. "You can make it!"
Legs pounding like flying piston rods, Bonfire began the last lap of his race against the ball. For half the distance between third and home, he ran without hearing a sound from the Belden fans. The silence spurred him on. But suddenly they waked into rustling hope. The ball was coming in. They murmured. They rumbled. They roared. They thundered like madmen. High above the din, Bonfire caught Specs' excited treble.
"Slide!" the voice vibrated. "Slide!"
Bonfire threw himself forward in a magnificent headlong dive. His hand ploughed toward the plate. Pebbles scratched his palm. Dust swirled up in clouds. And then, as his groping fingers found the cool rubber, he heard a thud above him, and the catcher clamped the ball hard on his protruding arm.
Bonfire leaped to his feet. The play had been close,very close. For an instant, he could see nothing but a cloud of dust. But as it cleared, his eyes found the umpire.
The man was leaning forward, arms flung wide, palms down. And he was saying, "Runner is safe!"
Lakeville had won the game and the State interscholastic baseball championship,—Lakeville and its substitutes.
The score:
Innings123456789TotalBelden0003000003Lakeville0200000024