Part 10

But, although the visitors didn’t score again in that quarter, they outplayed us badly. And they kept it up in the third period, too, after we had sung and cheered all during half-time. But they didn’t score. They had three perfectly good chances, and each time some turn of the luck queered them. Of course, our fellows did their bit. They were giving their well-known imitation of Horatius keeping the bridge. But, shucks, if it hadn’t been for a fumble on our three yards, a perfectly punk pass from center to fullback and holding in the line, Enwright would have scored three times in that quarter. The trouble with us was that we never forgot who we were up against. We were whatyoucallems――fatalists. When an Enwright runner was tackled he kept on running and made another yard, maybe two or three. When one of our fellows was tackled he quit cold. Same way in hitting the line. When one of our backs ran up against the defense he eased up. Even our punting showed it. We didn’t mean to quit, but we were doing it. We oozed through the third quarter with the score still twelve to seven, and we began to hope then that we could hold the score where it was. What happened after the whistle blew I got from Tru and Joe.

Coach Morgan called Joe from the bench. “Jones is very bad,” he said in that quiet, crisp way of his, “and they’re making too many gains at our center, Talmadge. It’s too bad we haven’t anyone to stiffen it, isn’t it? If it was only the second team I’d chance putting you in.”

Joe looked troubled. “I’ll try my best, sir,” he said doubtfully.

“We-ell, I don’t know. They’ve got us beaten anyway, and――――”

Joe flared up. “_They_ have! Like fun they have! We’ve got ourselves beaten. There isn’t a fellow out there that doesn’t think he’s done for right now. There isn’t one of ’em that really _expects_ to win. There isn’t more than one or two that’s _trying_. They’re just dying game, that’s all they’re doing! Beaten! Yah, that Enwright bunch would quit cold if someone put up a real fight!”

“Think so?” asked the coach mildly. “I wonder. Too bad someone couldn’t go out there and convince them of that, isn’t it, Talmadge?”

“Yes, but what’s the use? They won’t believe it, Coach.”

“They might――if it was put to them hard enough,” the man mused.

Joe began to pull up his sweater sort of half-heartedly.

“If _you_ think that way, Talmadge, you might get the others to. You might try it. It wouldn’t do any harm. We’re beaten anyway, and――――”

“That ain’t so!” cried Joe angrily. “You know it, too!”

“What good does my knowing it do?” asked Morgan gently.

Joe pulled his sweater over his head and flung it behind him.

“Jones?” he asked.

The coach nodded. “And tell Truitt I said I’d changed my plans. Tell him I’ve decided to win the game.”

Joe grinned. Then he ran on just in time and pushed Jones out of the way.

It was Enwright’s ball on her forty-six yards, second down and five to go when Joe arrived. Tru looked a bit puzzled at the message for a moment, but then he grasped the idea and it seemed to do him a lot of good. “That’s the stuff!” he cried hoarsely. “We’ve got orders from the coach to win this, fellows! What d’ye say now! Everyone into it hard! All we want’s one score. Let’s get it!”

Enwright tried out the new center and made only a yard. Joe jeered at them. “Come again!” he told them. “Always glad to see you!” They got three past left tackle and Joe was on Conners like a ton of bricks, bawling him out. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Trying to chuck this game away? Fight, you big baby! Don’t let ’em walk over you! _Fight!_”

Conners was so surprised that he forgot to get mad until it was too late. Tru said that having Joe butt in and take things out of his hands like that sort of flabbergasted him, but he was so tired and used up he was glad to have someone else do the bossing. Enwright only needed another yard to make her distance and she tried to shove her way past Conners for it. But Conners was insulted and mad clean through now, and he wouldn’t have it, and blamed if we didn’t take the ball away from them in the middle of the field, and for the first time that day!

After that Joe created his own atmosphere, as he had put it to me, and it was a brand new atmosphere for the rest of the bunch. He kept dinning it into them that they were going to win, that Enwright was a lot of quitters and all tired out, anyway, that they only needed a touchdown and that they were on their way to it. And blessed if they didn’t begin to believe it! And it wasn’t long before Enwright was thinking there might be something in it, too! Tru said you could notice the difference five minutes after the last quarter began. They eased up and didn’t round off their plays. Their quarter began to change signals, and once they went back and put their heads together. When they did that Joe gloated openly and began to show even more pep.

“Sure!” he cried, “Talk it over! Know you’re beaten, don’t you? If you’ve got anything left, show it! Time’s getting short!”

It was, too. There was only about seven minutes left. We had taken the ball back to their twenty-eight and had to punt, and they had run it back to the thirty-six and were shy four yards on the third down. They got two of the four on a delayed pass that fooled every one on our team except Joe, it seemed, and then had to punt. Of course, all they wanted now was to kill time, and they tried every means they knew. But White got away from our thirty-five with a run that landed the pigskin past the middle again and then Morgan sent Presson back into the line-up and Press ate up ten yards in three plunges. It looked like we had them going then, and we were cheering ourselves hoarse on the stand. Joe snarled and bullied, and praised, too, and in those last five minutes he had every fellow on the team working for him like dogs. And they all expected to win, too. That’s the funny part of it. Dobbs told me afterwards that if we’d been beaten he would have cried like a kid. But we weren’t. No, sir, we weren’t. Not that year. We ate them up from their thirty-eight yards right down to their ten. They stiffened then and at first it was like chipping concrete to make gains. There was hardly more than a minute left. We could hear Joe barking and yelping. Even when he sounded the maddest you felt sure that he was going to get what he was after.

And Enwright knew it, too. Yes, sir, Enwright showed it right then. She wasn’t cocky any longer. She was pegged out and nervous and discouraged. You could see it in the way the backs changed positions behind the forwards, not being sure where they’d better stay, and you could see it in the way the line started before the ball twice. We made a yard and a half on the first plunge and lost the half on the second, and it was nine to go on the third down.

We were all off the stand by that time, clustering along the side line and back of the goal, cheering and yelping at one moment and then being so still the quarter’s voice sounded like claps of thunder. Our right end scampered off, Joe passed to the quarter, quarter faked a forward and dropped the ball to Maynard and Maynard shot straight into the center. Joe was clearing the hole out for him, and he did it to the king’s taste. Right through and into the secondary defense plunged Joe, taking them with him as he went, while Maynard, head down, pigskin clutched to his tummy, followed after. They stopped them short of the last line, but not much short, and we still had another down.

The timekeeper was walking nearer and nearer with his eyes on his watch and we fellows looking on almost had heart failure. It seemed to us that our team had never taken longer to line up and that the quarter had never been so slow with his signals. But he got them out finally and――Oh, well, you know what happened. It was Joe again, and Maynard again, and Enwright went down like nine-pins and our whole team broke through her center and went tumbling, streaming over the goal line! And when the whistle blew Joe had to trot back from the other side of the end line, he had been going so hard!

That’s how we broke the hoodoo. Tru failed at goal, but we had won, thirteen to twelve, anyway. They elected Joe captain a week later, and he would have been a corker if the war hadn’t come along. He went over in the spring, and the next thing we heard he was top sergeant. I’m sorry for the Huns in front of Joe’s platoon if he used that psychology stuff!

BILLY MAYES’ GREAT DISCOVERY

Captain Ezra Blake, seated on the edge of the deck-house of the little schooner _Molly and Kate_, was trying to do two things at once. He was superintending the unloading of ballast by a crew of four men and a boy and he was answering the questions of Billy Mayes, who sat beside him. Billy was twelve and Captain Ezra was almost five times twelve, but they were great cronies. The _Molly and Kate_ was tied up to Forster’s Wharf only last evening, and already, this being a Saturday morning, Billy was on hand to hear what wonderful adventures had befallen his friend on the latest voyage. The _Molly and Kate_ carried lumber to fascinating Southern ports like Charleston and Savannah and Jacksonville and even, less frequently, Havana, and never a voyage but what Captain Ezra returned with a new budget of marvelous tales for Billy’s delight. Some day Billy was going to sail with the Captain and see the astounding places and things with his own two very blue eyes: see Charleston and Cape Hatteras and the Sea Islands and Florida. But more especially he would visit Pirate Key, for it was on Pirate Key that the Captain met with his very startlingest adventures. Billy had never been able to find Pirate Key on any map, but, as the Captain explained, it wasn’t very big and few mariners even knew of its existence. Somewhere between the Marquesas and the Dry Tortugas it lay, and beyond that the Captain declined to commit himself: which, under the circumstances, Billy considered quite proper, for it seemed that the natives of Pirate Key were a peculiarly sensitive people and much averse to visitors and publicity. Even the Captain, with his winning personality, had had much difficulty in becoming friends with the inhabitants of the island. The first time he had tried to land on it, many years ago, he and his crew had been fired on with poisoned arrows. Captain Ezra could still point out the dents made by the arrows on the old blue dory that trailed astern there. The Captain, with one mild gray eye on the crew, had just finished a soul-stirring account of the hurricane that had met them off the South Carolina coast on their northward trip, and Billy was still glowing with pride at the thought of knowing so intimately a person of such nautical skill and personal bravery, for, although the Captain hadn’t said so in so many words, it was very plain that only heroism and remarkable seamanship had brought the _Molly and Kate_ safely through great peril, when “Long Joe” Bowen, shoveling sand nearby, was conquered by a perfectly terrible spasm of coughing and choking. Captain Ezra viewed him silently for a moment and then inquired mildly:

“Been an’ swallered some o’ that sand, Joe?”

“Long Joe” nodded and said “Yes, sir,” in a very husky voice.

“Mm, well you want to be more careful,” advised the Captain most sympathetically, “’cause if you ain’t I’m likely to have to swab out your throat for you, an’ that’s a remarkably painful operation, Joe.”

There was no response to this, but Billy could see “Long Joe’s” shoulders heaving and knew that he must already be in much pain. Billy, like his friend the Captain, had a very sympathetic nature. When the sufferer appeared to be easier Billy looked up again at the Captain’s seamed and ruddy countenance and asked:

“Did you get to Pirate Key this time, sir?”

“Pirate Key?” responded the Captain. “Oh, yes, we were there a couple o’ days. Not on business, but you see I’d promised the King I’d drop in on him the next time I was down around there. Seein’ as he leads a kind o’ lonely life, an’ him an’ me bein’ particular friends, as you might say, I didn’t have the heart to say no to him.”

“Was he quite well?” asked Billy politely.

“Pretty smart for an old fellow. You see, Billy, he’s――let me see――why, he must be well over a hundred now.”

“A hundred!” gasped the boy.

The Captain nodded gravely. “Them Pirate Key folks lives a long time. They don’t go to school until they’re twenty. If they did, you see, they’d forget all they’d learned afore they was what you might call middle-aged.”

Billy pondered that. Not going to school until one was twenty had things to be said in its favor. Still, it was revolutionary, and he decided to put it aside for further consideration.

“And how was the Queen? And the Prince?” he asked interestedly.

“Well, the Queen was well, but the Prince had been an’ ate something as didn’t agree with him. The Royal Physician was some worried when I got there, but I give him a couple o’ doses of kerosine oil an’ it did him a power o’ good.”

“The――the physician?” asked Billy doubtfully.

“No, the Prince, o’ course. There wasn’t nothing the matter with the physician.” The Captain sounded slightly vexed. “He’d been an’ ate some――some――what’s this now?――some hoki-moki fruit.” He viewed Billy sternly. “The Prince had.”

“Really?” asked Billy. “What――what is hoki-moki fruit like?”

“Well,” replied the narrator, knocking the ashes from his pipe and thoughtfully scraping the bowl with his pocket knife, “it’s a sort o’ like a orange an’ sort o’ like a apple.”

“Oh!”

“An’ it’s pizen if you eat it afore it’s ripe. Don’t never touch a hoki-moki fruit till it’s purple, Billy.”

Billy promised instantly. “Only,” he added, “I might not know it, Captain Ezra, if I was to go to Pirate Key. Is it round? Does it grow on trees?”

“More square than round, you might say. It grows in clusters as big as that water cask there. Hundreds of ’em together. An’ they grow high because if they didn’t the wild horses would eat ’em when they was green an’ die. That’s one o’ the wonders o’ Nature, Billy.”

“Yes, sir. But I didn’t know horses ate fruit.”

“Ain’t you ever see a horse eat a apple? Why, they’re plumb fond o’ apples. Bananas, too. An’ watermelons. Guess the only kind o’ fruit a horse won’t eat is cocoanuts.” The Captain filled his pipe leisurely and in silence. Then: “Another peculiar thing, Billy, is that you might call the affinity o’ the hoki-moki tree an’ them wild horses. They can’t keep away from ’em, the horses can’t. There’s something about the――the tree itself that draws the horses: something in the wood, they say. You don’t never find any bark on a hoki-moki tree low down because the wild horses keeps rubbin’ themselves against it. Seems like they just can’t resist the――the sub-tile influence. It’s extraordinary.”

Billy agreed emphatically that it was. “Are there many wild horses on the key?” he inquired after a moment.

“Thousands. The natives catch ’em an’ train ’em. The King has more’n three hundred horses in his private stable, an’ the Queen she has about a hundred, an’ the Prince he’s got maybe thirty or forty, too.” The Captain applied a lighted match to his pipe and puffed blue smoke clouds into the spring sunlight. “They kill ’em for their hides, too,” he went on presently. “They make fine leather.”

“I shouldn’t think they’d need leather,” said Billy, “being just savages.”

“Savages!” The Captain viewed him reprovingly. “Don’t you ever let ’em hear you say that, son! Benighted, in a manner o’ speakin’, they may be, but they ain’t savages. As for leather, why, now, they make lots o’ uses o’ it: saddles an’ harnesses an’ travelin’ bags――――”

“Traveling bags!”

“――An’ trunks.” The captain paid no heed to the interruption. “An’ here’s another peculiar thing. You may be able to explain it, but I can’t, an’ I never heard anyone who could. Them hoki-moki trees has just as much affinity for a horse-hide as they has for the horse himself. Lay a horse-hide saddle twenty feet away from a hoki-moki tree an’ just as soon as you lets go of it it’ll begin to move right over to the tree and try to rub itself against it! Now you explain that!”

“But I can’t,” said Billy, wide-eyed. “It――it’s most――most extronry!”

“It surely is!” declared the Captain. “What you might call one o’ the marvels o’ Science. I ain’t never――That the lot, Joe? Well, I guess it’s most dinner time, ain’t it? Talkin’ always gives me a powerful appetite an’ I’m plumb famished. Sing out to Steve to start that galley fire an’ get a hustle on him!”

Billy’s thoughts dwelt a good deal for the rest of that day on Captain Ezra’s interesting discourse, and when he went to sleep it was to dream terribly complicated things about wild horses and hoki-moki trees and the fascinating inhabitants of Pirate Key who wore the scantiest attires but indulged themselves in traveling bags! Sunday was always a hard day to live through, for after church and Sunday school were past many empty hours stretched ahead. This Sunday, however, was not so bad, for Mr. Humbleton, the bank treasurer, came to call in the afternoon and brought Arthur Humbleton with him. Arthur was fourteen and a youth of affairs and position in the community, as became the son of a bank treasurer. For one thing, Arthur was captain of the Broadport Junior Baseball Team. Billy and Arthur were graciously allowed to retire from the front parlor and the society of their elders and found sanctuary on the little side porch where the chill of an easterly April breeze failed to penetrate. Billy was glad of the opportunity to talk to Arthur, for he had a request to make, and after several false starts he managed to make it.

“I wish,” he said, after swallowing hard a couple of times, “I wish you’d let me play on the nine this year, Arthur.”

Arthur Humbleton observed him frowningly. Then he shook his head. “I don’t see how I could, Billy,” he answered. “The team’s all made up, in the first place, and then you aren’t much of a player. Maybe next year――――”

“I can play in the outfield all right,” defended Billy eagerly.

“Oh, most any fellow can catch a fly,” replied the other carelessly. “There’s more to baseball than just that, Billy. You’ve got to know how to run the bases and bat and lots of things.”

“I can run bases just as fast as――――” Billy paused. He had been going to say “as you can,” but diplomacy came to his aid. “As fast as Tom Wallace can,” he substituted.

“Maybe, but you can’t bat a little bit,” responded Arthur triumphantly. “And you know you can’t.”

“If I had more practice, Arthur――――”

“No, sir, you couldn’t ever be a real corking batter.” Arthur was kindly but firm. “A fellow has to have the batting eye. Of course I don’t say that maybe if you worked awfully hard this year and practiced every day you mightn’t be a lot better, but I don’t believe you’ll ever be a real star, Billy.”

The subject, engrossing to both boys, continued for some time, and in the end it was agreed that Billy should become a sort of unofficial outfield substitute with the privilege of practicing with the nine sometimes and making himself useful chasing the long flies that infrequently went over Mr. Bannerman’s garden fence. As Mr. Bannerman was aged and crabbed and disliked seeing small boys wallowing across his asparagus bed in search of baseballs, the position assigned to Billy promised as much danger as honor. But he knew himself to be fast on his feet and knew Mr. Bannerman to be slow, and he accepted gratefully. Soon after that Arthur was summoned hurriedly by his father, so hurriedly that he left behind him an enticing blue paper-bound pamphlet entitled “How to Play Base Ball” which Billy discovered just before supper and which he surreptitiously studied later behind the shielding pages of “Travels in the Holy Land.”

But he found it difficult to understand until he happened on a dozen pages at the end of the booklet devoted to advertisements of baseball goods. There were soul-stirring pictures and descriptions of mitts and gloves, bats and masks and balls. He admired and coveted, and mentally compared the prices set down against the articles with the contents of the little box in his top bureau drawer that was his bank. The comparison wasn’t encouraging. Billy sighed. And just then his eyes fell on a word that challenged attention. “Westcott’s Junior League Ball,” he read. “Regulation size and weight, rubber center, all-wool yarn, double cover of best quality selected horsehide. Warranted to last a full game without losing elasticity or shape.”

Billy read it twice. Then he became thoughtful. After that he read the description of the baseball again and his eyes became big and round. Later, in bed, with the light from the electric lamp at the corner illuming the ceiling, he lay sleeping for a long hour, experiencing the triumph that thrills all great discoverers and inventors.

The next morning he surprised every member of the household by being downstairs in advance of breakfast _and with his shoes tied_! His mother viewed him anxiously and felt his face but was unable to detect anything abnormal save, perhaps, a certain intensity of gaze and impatience of delay. There was a full half-hour between breakfast and school and Billy made the most of it. Captain Ezra was smoking his pipe on the wharf when Billy arrived, breathless, on the scene.

“Well, well,” exclaimed the Captain. “Ain’t you round kind of early?”

But there was scant time for amenities and Billy plunged directly into his business. “Are you going down South again pretty soon, sir?” he inquired anxiously. The Captain allowed that he was; as soon, in fact, as the new cargo was aboard, which, if he wasn’t saddled with the laziest crew on record, ought to be in about four days. “And are you going to Pirate Key?” Billy continued. The Captain blinked.

“Well, I might,” he replied after slight hesitation. “Why?”

“Because I want you to bring me a piece of that hoki-moki wood, sir, a piece big enough to make a bat. You see――――”

“A bat? What sort of a bat?”

“Why, a baseball bat. Could you, do you think? It would have to be that long――” Billy stretched his arms――“and that big around――” Billy formed a circle with his small fingers――“and it oughtn’t to have any knots in it. Is hoki-moki very knotty, Captain Ezra?”

“Knotty? N-no, I wouldn’t call it that. I――――” He coughed and cast a troubled gaze toward the lighthouse point. “What was it you wanted it for, now?”

“A baseball bat,” answered Billy, almost impatiently. “I thought if you could get me a piece big enough I could get Jerry Williams, over at Morris’s carpenter shop, to make it for me. Could you? Would it――would it be much trouble to you, sir?”

“Why, n-no, only――hm――you see I ain’t plumb sure of gettin’ to Pirate Key this trip, Billy.” Billy’s face fell and Captain Ezra went on quickly. “But I ain’t sayin’ I won’t, you know. Fact is, it’s more’n likely I will. An’ if I _do_――――”

“Oh, will you please?” cried Billy, beaming. “How much would it cost, sir? I’ve only got twenty-two cents, but if you’d take that I’d pay you the rest when you came back.” He dug into a pocket, but the Captain waved the suggestion aside.

“Shucks,” he said, “a little piece o’ wood ain’t goin’ to cost nothin’. Why, I guess I could bring off a whole tree if I wanted it. I guess there ain’t anything on that there island I couldn’t have for the askin’, Billy, the King an’ me bein’ so friendly. Tell you what I’ll do now. I’ll get ’em to cut a piece o’ that wood an’ make the bat for you right there. How’ll that be?”

Billy looked dubious. “Why, that’s awfully kind, sir, but――but do you think they’d know how to make a baseball bat? Bats have to be made awf’ly partic’larly, Captain Ezra, or else they aren’t much good.”

“Don’t you worry about that, son. They been makin’ their own bats on Pirate Key for years, an’ I guess there ain’t no better ones to be had.”