第30章 BREAKING INTO FAST COMPANY(4)

The field grew tolerably quiet just then.The Rube did not exert himself.The critical stage had no concern for him.He pitched Lane a high curve, over the plate, but in close, a ball meant to be hit and a ball hard to hit safely.Lane knew that as well as any hitter in the world, so he let two of the curves go by--two strikes.Again the Rube relentlessly gave him the same ball; and Lane, hitting viciously, spitefully, because he did not want to hit that kind of a ball, sent up a fly that Rand easily captured.

``Oh, I don't know! Pretty fair, I guess!''

yelled a tenor-voiced fan; and he struck the key-note.And the bleachers rose to their feet and gave the Rube the rousing cheer of the brotherhood of fans.

Hoffer walked to first on a base on balls.

Sweeney advanced him.The Rube sent up a giant fly to Callopy.Then Staats hit safely, scoring the first run of the game.Hoffer crossed the plate amid vociferous applause.Mitchell ended the inning with a fly to Blandy.

What a change had come over the spirit of that Quaker aggregation! It was something to make a man thrill with admiration and, if he happened to favor Chicago, to fire all his fighting blood.

The players poured upon the Rube a continuous stream of scathing abuse.They would have made a raging devil of a mild-mannered clergyman.

Some of them were skilled in caustic wit, most of them were possessed of forked tongues; and Cogswell, he of a thousand baseball battles, had a genius for inflaming anyone he tormented.This was mostly beyond the ken of the audience, and behind the back of the umpire, but it was perfectly plain to me.The Quakers were trying to rattle the Rube, a trick of the game as fair for one side as for the other.I sat there tight in my seat, grimly glorying in the way the Rube refused to be disturbed.But the lion in him was rampant.

Fortunately, it was his strange gift to pitch better the angrier he got; and the more the Quakers flayed him, the more he let himself out to their crushing humiliation.

The innings swiftly passed to the eighth with Chicago failing to score again, with Philadelphia failing to score at all.One scratch hit and a single, gifts to the weak end of the batting list, were all the lank pitcher allowed them.Long since the bleachers had crowned the Rube.He was theirs and they were his; and their voices had the peculiar strangled hoarseness due to over-exertion.

The grand stand, slower to understand and approve, arrived later; but it got there about the seventh, and ladies' gloves and men's hats were sacrificed.

In the eighth the Quakers reluctantly yielded their meed of praise, showing it by a cessation of their savage wordy attacks on the Rube.It was a kind of sullen respect, wrung from the bosom of great foes.

Then the ninth inning was at hand.As the sides changed I remembered to look at the feminine group in our box.Milly was in a most beautiful glow of happiness and excitement.Nan sat rigid, leaning over the rail, her face white and drawn, and she kept saying in a low voice:

``Will it never end? Will it never end?'' Mrs.

Nelson stared wearily.