CHAPTER XII

LEFTY’S FAILURE

The call was for a curve ball, and Lefty did his best to respond. Unfortunately he put so much curve into it that the sphere missed the plate by at least two feet. Whalen looked surprised, but said nothing. Lefty felt the blood rushing into his face and making his head pound more than ever.

The backstop then signaled for a fast straight ball, indicating with one hand that it was to cross the batter’s shoulders. It was straight enough, but woefully lacking in speed, and Carl Siegrist promptly hit it on the trademark and dusted to first.

Had this been a championship game, the rangy infielder, who had hit well over three hundred for several seasons, would have made it good for two bags, or even three. Siegrist, like all the other old men, did not believe in straining himself unduly, however. He took things easy, and camped on the initial sack.

“Rotten!” snapped Ogan, from first. “What in Sam Hill’s the matter with you, Locke?”

“Yes,” chimed in Tom Burley, at short; “this isn’t croquet. Wake up.”

“Let’s have a little of that smoke you had up your sleeve the other day,” added the third baseman.

Lefty made no reply to these remarks. He was watching Brennan’s face as the manager left the plate to take up his position behind the pitcher. Brennan looked anything but pleased, and, though he made no remark, Locke fancied he knew what was passing through his mind.

The next batter drew two balls in succession, and then created a momentary respite for Lefty by flying out to center field. His successor, however, smashed the first pitched ball over the infield, and romped down the line amid a howl of delight from the regulars, whose interest in the game was warming up.

Instantly a gatling fire of sarcasm was turned on Lefty by his teammates. Ogan raced into the diamond and caught the pitcher’s arm.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed fiercely. “Are you trying to throw the game away?”

Lefty shook his head. His face was white now, his eye desperate. He knew he was making a miserable exhibition. He should not have started; he should have gone to Ogan before the game and told him he wasn’t in fit condition to pitch. His head was splitting so that he could scarcely see. He seemed to have no strength left in his arm.

“Perhaps you’d better take me out, Al,” he muttered. “I seem to be on the fritz.”

“You bet you are!” retorted the captain hotly. Then, catching a glimpse of Lefty’s wretched face, he hesitated an instant. “I’ll give you one more chance, Locke,” he went on shortly. “If you don’t make good, out you go. I’m not going to have this game handed over on a silver tray if I can help it. You’ve got the goods, Locke; brace up and hand ’em out.”

When Ogan had gone back to his position, Lefty turned and glanced at the plate. His heart sank when he saw that Buck Fargo stood there, swinging his bat negligently. Nevertheless, with set teeth, the southpaw toed the rubber and pitched.

It was a straight, high ball that cut the plate in half, and Brennan’s voice droned out “Strike!” as the batter let it pass. Lefty was heartened, and, at a signal from Whalen, he tried an outcurve. As before, this curved too far out even to cut a corner. Another ball followed, and then another strike. Then Fargo swung above a drop ball, and was declared out.

As the big backstop tossed his bat aside and strolled, grinning, to the bench, there was a sigh of relief from the Yannigan infield. Perhaps their pitcher was taking an almost-despaired-of brace. One or two gave voice to brief words of commendation; but Lefty did not hear them. He was staring after Fargo in a puzzled way. No one knew better than he――unless it was Andy Whalen――how far those deliveries had fallen short of his usual form. He could not understand why Buck had failed to make connections.

There was no time to think of that, however, for Bill Hagin was strutting to the plate. To Lefty his expression seemed more cocky and self-assured than ever, and the bush pitcher felt a sudden ardent longing to send him back to the bench as his predecessor had gone.

Whalen signaled for a drop, but Lefty had watched Hagin batting the day before, and felt that a straight, speedy one, placed high, would bother him more. He notified the catcher to that effect, toed the rubber, tried to forget his pounding head, gathered every muscle for the effort, and pitched.

The horsehide whirled toward the plate with speed enough, but crossed it a good foot below where Lefty intended. The bat met it squarely, with every ounce of the big fielder’s muscle behind it, and Lefty uttered a stifled groan of despairing surrender as the regulars began to circle the bases blithely.

What had gone before was as nothing to the roar which rose from the cubs when they saw three grinning players jog, one after the other, across the plate. As one man, they turned on Lefty and poured out the vials of their wrath in vivid, soul-stirring, mouth-filling phrases, which left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Interspersed with these gusts of abuse were yells of: “Take him out! Take――him――out!” which were quite unnecessary. Lefty realized that he was done for, and did not even glance toward Ogan as he walked toward the bench. He heard the latter’s angry voice, however, yelling after him: “Get off the field, you boneheaded quitter!” And that seemed to hurt more than anything else.

He wasn’t a quitter. He had done his best, and it was not his fault that he had failed. No doubt he should never have gone out there at all, but how many of those others, face to face with the alternative he had met that morning, would have decided differently?

Head down and hands tightly clenched, he made his way toward the bench, not even looking up as he passed Bert Elgin, racing out to take his place. He flung himself down on the turf and lay there, chin propped in his cupped hands, eyes staring blindly out across the diamond.

More than once the regulars glanced curiously in his direction, but no one spoke. A little later, when the Yannigans trooped in, having succeeded in holding down the score, Lefty fully expected a storm of bitter reproaches to be hurled at him; but nothing came. The fellows took their places on the bench or the coaching lines without so much as a glance toward the chap lying there on the grass. For all the attention they paid to him, he might have been a log of wood.

As inning after inning passed amid that same studied silence and marked avoidance, Lefty felt that he would rather have endured sneers, blows, anything else. His head still throbbed and he was feeling wretched, mentally and physically. He was a fool not to have left the field at once; but, being there, his innate stubbornness kept him to the end.

Presently Jack Stillman came up and chatted casually for a minute or two, but Lefty was so mortally averse to pity that his replies were short almost to ungraciousness; and the reporter walked away, a puzzled look on his face.

By dint of fast, strenuous playing on the part of the cubs, assisted by the easy-going ways of their opponents, the regulars were kept from further scoring, while the Yannigans made two tallies before the end of the last inning. But for Locke’s errors they would have won the game. The realization did not tend toward soothing their ruffled spirits.

As the teams mingled on the field at the end of the fifth inning, the one crowd grinning and joshing, the other responding with defensive sarcasm, Lefty caught an angry glare from more than one pair of eyes among the disappointed youngsters.

“I s’pose they all have it in for me,” he muttered.

The next instant he saw Jim Brennan bearing down upon him, his face more florid than ever, his sharp eyes glinting.

“Good night!” the southpaw murmured. “Here’s my finish.”

Instinctively he rose to his feet and stood there, nervously juggling his glove, his eyes fixed upon the approaching manager, waiting for the storm to break.