CHAPTER XIX.

“THE MAN WHO WON THE GAME.”

“Yee-ee-ee!” screamed King Jimmy, the Conqueror, as he waved his tattered hat over his head. “Here he is, fellers!”

Then King Jimmy’s loyal subjects danced and capered and yelled and stood on their heads and turned cart-wheels.

Oh, it was a great and thrilling moment! Proud? Why, Jimmy hardly deigned to breathe just plain ordinary every-day air! It was not good enough for him!

The Yale men were wild with delight, and the crowd was thrilled with the intensity of it all.

Roland Ditson sneered.

“He’s arrived too late,” Ditson declared. “The game is lost already, and he cannot save it.”

“How does the score stand?” Frank asked, as he met Hodge, who grasped his hand.

“Five to one, in their favor,” was the answer, “and it is the last of the seventh, with not a man out and the bases full.”

“Give me the ball!”

Frank walked into the box, and, although their sympathies were with Virginia, the crowd cheered him. He wore no ball-suit, but he had simply flung aside his coat and prepared to pitch that inning just as he was. There was no time for him to “warm up.”

Every man was ready now. Yale was herself again. A little while before those men had believed it impossible to win that game. Now, with Frank in the box, they regarded it as won already.

Frank began to pitch. He knew the situation was desperate, and he did not dally. He used all his skill at the very outset. He dealt out the double-shoot in liberal portions, and the first man to face him had soon fanned the air to the limit and retired. The next one met the same fate. The third fared no better, and Virginia obtained no more scores that inning.

Those Yale men gathered about Merry seeking an explanation, but he declined to make it until after the game.

“No time to talk now,” he said. “We’ve got to win this game, and that will keep us busy.”

“But we’ll win it!” they declared.

King Jimmy was surrounded by his subjects. Happy? Why, it didn’t seem that there was room enough for his swelling heart in his bosom.

The Yale men went to bat, and it happened that Merriwell was the first to come up. He got a two-bagger off the second ball Paragon delivered, and that brought the head of the batting-list, its strongest portion, against the U. V. pitcher.

Strange how fortune will seem to turn in a game of ball, the same as in a game of cards. A little while before none of those men seemed able to hit the ball; now they came up one after another and biffed it. Frank scored; Ready followed him; Castleman came round in turn—three scores before a man went out. Then, with Hodge and Browning ahead of him on the bags, Gamp put a fly into the hands of the left-fielder. Carson came up and was thrown out at first.

The score was five to four, and it seemed that Yale had suddenly come to a stand.

Carker got a good drive into right field, and Browning came puffing home.

The score was tied, and the inning ended with it that way.

The coming of Merriwell saved the game for Yale, the final score standing six to five. It was a tight squeeze, but one score was quite enough.

“And I owe everything to Jimmy Lee,” Merry declared, when the men gathered around him after the game.

Then he told how Jimmy, disguised as Old Ferret, the Sleepless Detective, had come to his rescue. And Jimmy was dragged forward and made a hero, while his subjects looked on and yelled like wildcats in their delight.

But when Frank sent an officer to look for the ruffians, they had awakened from their drunken slumbers, taken the alarm, and disappeared.

Hodge, however, had better luck in finding Ditson. He had a very agreeable interview with Ditson—that is, it was agreeable to him. It may have been somewhat painful to Ditson.

As Bart was washing the blood from his knuckles at the hotel somebody asked him what he had been doing.

“Licking the meanest cur in Virginia,” he replied.

When the Yale team departed for the North, a great crowd gathered at the station and cheered them off. Elsie was there, and she pressed the hands of both Frank and Bart, smiling upon them.

Just as Frank was about to step onto the train, somebody cried:

Three cheers for Frank Merriwell, the man who won the game!”

As they finished giving the cheers, Merry lifted in his arms a ragged, freckle-faced, blushing boy, crying:

“Here, gentlemen, is the man who won the game! Three cheers for Jimmy Lee!”

And the Yale men cheered handsomely. Then they gave him a regular Yale yell.

And he thought he was going to die right there from happiness.

Not until the train had rolled away did he come out of a trancelike state. Then somebody told him to wake up, for Frank Merriwell was gone.

“But he’s great!” said King Jimmy. “He’s the greatest feller that ever lived in all the whole world, and I can lick the man who says he ain’t, I don’t care if it is Jim Jeffries!”