CHAPTER XII

THE CALL TO BATTLE

It was a week later and Joe was returning from the post-office where he had stopped for the late afternoon mail.

Reggie had left the day before, although Joe had urged him to remain longer. But a clue had come from another State that, slender as it was, seemed to offer some chance of running down the elusive Tabbs, and Reggie had felt that he ought to follow it up.

“It’s too bad, old man,” Joe had said to him, as he stood on the station platform bidding the dudish young man goodby, “to have come so near to finding your man and yet just miss him.”

“Oh, it’s all in the game!” Reggie had answered, assuming a cheerfulness he was far from feeling. “I have a hunch that I’ll run across him yet and bring him to a show-down.”

“I’ll keep my eyes wide open, too,” Joe assured him, “and if I find out anything that will be of the slightest help I’ll let you know at once.”

But it was not of Reggie that Joe was thinking, as he hurried home through the dusk of the short winter afternoon. For he carried in his hand a big official-looking letter that bore on the upper left-hand corner the name of the New York Baseball Club.

He felt sure that it contained the contract, concerning which there had been so much speculation in the Matson home for the last few days. But eager as he was to know what it contained, he had restrained himself until he reached home, so that all could read it together.

“Here it is at last, Momsey!” he shouted, as he burst into the warm bright sitting room waving the envelope above his head.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” began his mother fondly, while Clara was across the room like a whirlwind and snatching at the letter.

“Open it up, open it up!” she pleaded. “I’m nearly crazy to know what’s in it.”

“Little girls should be seen and not heard,” teased her brother, as he held it tantalizingly out of her reach.

But she tickled him under his arm so that he dropped it with such undignified haste that she got possession of the letter, and like a flash had put the table between them.

Into the laughing group came Mr. Matson, just returned from the Harvester Works.

“What’s all the racket about?” he asked.

“Oh, Dad!” cried Clara, running to him and putting her arms about his neck. “It’s the letter from the New York Club, and it has Joe’s contract in it, and now we’ll know all about it and whether it’s for one year or three years, and----”

“It seems to me that you’re quite a prophetess, young lady,” laughed her father, as he sat down in his easy-chair and drew her to his lap, “especially as the letter hasn’t been opened yet.”

“Perhaps it’s just a note telling me that after thinking it over they don’t want me after all,” teased Joe.

“Well, now that we’re all here, suppose you settle the question by reading it,” suggested Mrs. Matson.

There was a moment of breathless suspense and it must be admitted that Joe’s hand was not quite steady as he tore open the envelope. There was a big formal document inside, and as Joe unfolded it a little blue slip fluttered out and fell to the floor. Clara was on it in an instant.

“It’s a check!” she exclaimed, with a little squeal of delight. “That looks a lot as if they didn’t want you, eh, Mr. Joseph Matson?”

It was a check for one hundred dollars to cover traveling expenses to the training camp.

Joe cleared his throat and began to read the formidable-looking document. It abounded with any number of “wherefores” and “whereases,” but the sum and substance of it was that the New York Club agreed to pay Joseph Matson the sum of four thousand five hundred dollars a year, for a period of three years from date.

Joe looked up at this point to see three shining pairs of eyes fixed upon him, although a suspicious moisture threatened to dim the brightness of those belonging to his mother and his sister.

“Four thousand five hundred dollars!” exclaimed Mr. Matson. “That’s an advance of fifteen hundred dollars over what you got last year. They certainly do things up in liberal style.”

“And that isn’t all,” cried Joe eagerly, as his eyes fell on a paragraph near the bottom of the page. “Here’s a bonus clause.”

“A bonus clause?” interrupted Clara. “What is that?”

“Something they offer as a premium if you do more than is expected of you,” explained her brother. “This says that I’ll get an extra thousand dollars if I win twenty games during the season.”

“That ought to be easy enough, I should think,” said Clara.

“Don’t you believe it,” laughed Joe. “In the first place, if it were easy they wouldn’t offer me anything extra for doing it. A pitcher is doing very well who wins two-thirds of the games he pitches. On that basis I’d have to pitch thirty games to have a chance of winning twenty. But if his old pitchers are going strong, McRae may keep me on the bench half the season and only put me in when they fall down. He’s a great one for depending on his old standbys. Then, too, I’ll be a newcomer, and perhaps the team won’t play behind me with the same confidence as when Hughson or Markwith are on the mound. That will make it harder for me to win games. You must remember, too, that all the teams on the circuit play harder against the New Yorks than they do against any other team. They take a special delight in downing the Giants before their home crowds, and they always save up their best pitchers for those occasions. So, take it altogether, there’s only a mere chance to win my twenty games during the season. I’m going to take that chance, though,” and into Joe’s eyes came a steely look that would have delighted McRae if that fighting leader of the Giants could have seen it.

The precious document was read and reread and discussed in all its bearings until Mrs. Matson insisted that supper would be stone cold if they did not come to the table at once. It is safe to say that in all Riverside that night no happier family grouped itself around the table than that in the Matson home.

“What’s the idea of the three-year clause, Joe?” asked his father, when they had fairly settled down to the meal. “Rather a compliment, I take it.”

“It is a sort of compliment,” admitted Joe. “They must feel pretty sure there’s something in me to bind themselves to pay that salary for so long a time. I didn’t really expect more than a one-year contract. Of course there’s another side to it. If I did especially well this first year, perhaps they figure I’d get a swelled head and hold them up for a big increase next year. As it is, no matter how well I do, I can’t get any more salary until the three-year period is up.

“Then too,” he went on, as he passed his plate for another helping, “there’s been a good deal of talk lately about this third big league. They’re awfully anxious to get star players so as to draw the public from the start, and the only way they can get them is to coax them away from the National or the American League. To do that they’ll have to offer enormous salaries. If I were bound for one year and the new league wanted me, they might try to get me to promise to join them as soon as my year was up. But with a three-year contract holding me, McRae won’t have to worry.”

“Those clubs must be awfully rich to tie themselves up for such an amount of money,” remarked Mrs. Matson. “Suppose a player lost his skill. Would they have to go on paying him just the same?”

“Not by a jugful,” laughed Joe. “There’s a little joker in the contract that permits the club to release a player on ten days’ notice.”

“But you can’t quit _them_ on ten days’ notice!” exclaimed Clara. “It doesn’t seem to me that that’s fair.”

“It isn’t fair on the face of it,” admitted Joe, “but as a matter of fact, it works out pretty well in practice. In the first place, the club is crazy to get hold of good players and is only too anxious to keep them if they behave themselves and play the game. If a player gets a ten days’ notice, it’s usually because he deserves it. The club has to have some protection against careless or drunken or dissipated players, and the ten days’ notice gives it to them.

“Take it altogether, the players get a square deal,” he concluded. “They get bigger salaries than almost any of them could command in any other walk of life. They travel in Pullman cars with every luxury that the richest passenger can command. They dine and sleep in the finest hotels in the country. When they’re on the road, all their expenses are paid by the club, so that their salaries are pure velvet. Nearly half the year they have to themselves, and don’t have to work at all unless they want to. During their playing days they have plenty of time to study and prepare themselves for some profession later on. Lots of them become lawyers or dentists or prosperous business men. Some of them go on the stage and make more in a month than the average man can make in a year. Hughson of the New Yorks opened an insurance office one winter and people fairly fell over each other to do business with him. They just wanted to tell their friends that they had done business with the great Hughson.

“Oh, we poor baseball ‘slaves’ are doing pretty well, thank you,” Joe ended, with a laugh, as his hand tightened on the contract and the crisp blue check that had come with it.