In a small, bare room of the clubhouse Al Carson waited, his face dark as a storm cloud. At times he muttered to himself. From the adjoining quarters of the defeated players there came no sounds of joshing or laughter. The loss of this game was a disagreeable pill for either management or men to swallow.
After a time a heavy step sounded outside, the door opened, and Lefty Locke appeared before the manager. He was pale now beneath his healthy tan, but still his once handsome, good-natured face wore a sullen, defiant expression, and his flinty eyes met Carson’s withering look without wavering.
“Well,” he said, his voice strangely harsh, “you sent for me.”
For a moment Carson felt that he was going to blow up like a firecracker, but, somehow, he managed to control himself in a measure.
“Yes, I sent for you,” he said. “I want to hear what you have to say for yourself.”
“I’m not going to say anything.”
“Oh, you’re not! You’re not going to say anything after handing the Specters that game on a platter? You’re not going to say a word after an exhibition that would make a jackass weep?”
“I don’t see any tears in your eyes.”
Then Carson did go up. “You infernal, insolent, swell-headed cub!” he shouted. “You think you can talk to me that fashion just because you happen to have a pull with—” Barely in time he bit the sentence short. His breast heaving, his nostrils distended, he announced: “I’ll show you! I’ll teach you that you can’t deliberately throw a game!”
“Any man who says I ever deliberately threw a game is a liar!”
Rarely in his baseball career had a player talked to Carson like that. The manager could scarcely believe the evidence of his ears, and for a moment he choked, his face purple, in an effort to articulate.
“I oughter beat your head off!” he finally ground forth.
“Try it!” invited Locke.
The manager knew better than to try it. That tall, compact, finely built man looked like a thorough athlete, and just now the expression on his face seemed to betoken that he would gladly welcome a hand-to-hand scrap with anyone.
“I won’t maul you,” panted Carson.
“I’m sorry,” regretted the southpaw.
“But I’ll teach you something, just the same. You’re fined twenty-five and suspended.”
For a moment or two Lefty was silent. “Perhaps you think you can make that penalty stick,” he said presently. “Perhaps you think, simply because I lost a game—I’m not denying I lost it—you can call me into a private room and browbeat me, and fine me when I fail to cower and eat humble pie.”
“I’m fining you for your rotten work on the field. I’d fined you then and there if I’d got hold of you before you loped off.”
“You’re fining me from pure malicious revenge, nothing else. As a manager you play your favorites, and I don’t happen to be one of them.”
“Shut up!” roared Carson. “Shut up, or I’ll double it!”
“Double and be—hanged! I don’t have to play baseball for a living. You can suspend me as long as you please. I’m getting tired of the game, anyway, and thinking about quitting.”
“Oh, you’re a quitter, all right. I reckon old Brennan, of the Hornets, had you sized up about right in the first place.” Carson’s total lack of diplomacy was amazing. Had he tried, with deliberate forethought, to create an unbridgable breach between himself and the left-hander, he could not have chosen a surer course. “The yellow streak always crops up sooner or later in any man who has it,” he went on. “You can pitch, with everything breaking for you, but you lack heart. A little streak of success swelled you up till you began to think yourself a king-pin. You had an idea that you were a better man than Pete Grist, and now—”
“Have you finished?” interrupted Lefty, his voice quivering strangely. “I think I’d better go. In about ten seconds more I’ll do something that will put me liable to a fine for assault and battery.”
His attitude was that of a man about to attack another when the door opened and Charles Collier entered, followed by a clean-looking, tall young man. Both stopped and stared in astonishment at the tableau.
“What—what’s the matter here?” spluttered the owner of the Blue Stockings. “What’s the trouble, Carson?”
“Oh, nothing,” answered the manager. “Nothing, only this fellow threatens me with assault when I give him a call-down for his wooden-headed work in that last inning.”
“Really, Locke, I’m astonished,” said Collier, beginning to show a touch of anger himself. “You must know Mr. Carson has a right to feel sore.”
“But he hasn’t a right to blackguard me. He can do that with other men, perhaps, but he can’t put it over on me.”
“I’m simply telling him the cold facts,” the manager hastened to assert. “He thinks himself so high and mighty that no one has a right to say a thing to him. He’s been coddled and spoiled. There’s no surer way to spoil a cub than to feed him taffy. It’s his first season out of the bush, and he’s beginning to reckon himself a second Walter Johnson.”
“You’re both excited,” said Collier, in an attempt to be soothing. “Of course, there’s a good reason, the game to-day meaning so much, but it’s better to talk these things over in cold blood. Let’s calm down a little, all of us.”
His effort to cast oil on the troubled waters was partly successful, as far as Carson was concerned; for the manager did not wish the magnate to think him a person to lose his temper unreasonably in dealing with any player.
“I called him in to talk it over decently,” he said; “but he became nasty right off the reel.”
“Any man can talk to me decently,” muttered Lefty, though the resentful light still lingered in his eyes.
“That’s right, my boy; that’s the way to feel,” said Collier, rubbing his hands. “It’s too bad we lost the game, but we’ll simply have to fight the harder for the rest of the series. If we break even, we’ll still have it on the Specters. Perhaps Hazelton has been working too hard. I understand Kennedy used him a great deal. Perhaps he needs a rest.”
“Maybe he does,” growled Carson. “Anyhow, I’m going to give him one.”
“It’s likely a few days will put him back into form. My daughter is a good judge of baseball players, and she has confidence in Lefty.”
The young man who had entered with the owner moved his shoulders uneasily, and bit his lip. Suddenly Collier seemed to remember him.
“Mr. Carson,” he said, “let me introduce a man who wanted to meet you. A friend of myself and daughter—Mr. Parlmee. Shake hands with Carson, Franklin.”
“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Carson,” said Parlmee, as he gave the manager his hand.
“And Mr. Hazelton, too,” said the magnate, with a wave toward the southpaw. “Son of an old friend of mine. Unfortunately, his father has a prejudice against baseball, so he’s playing under the name of Locke.”
For the first time since the appearance of the club owner and his companion, Lefty’s eyes rested on the face of the latter. In a moment he was vaguely aware that he had seen the man before, but not until Parlmee had bowed coldly, without an attempt to shake hands, did Locke recall the occasion. Then he remembered how in the last home game with the Specters, while he was talking with Virginia Collier, he had seen a young man watching him gloweringly from the stand. This was the same man, and between the two there existed a singular feeling of antipathy, as yet unaccounted for in the pitcher’s mind.
Suddenly it seemed to Lefty that everything was against him, the whole world—fate, even.
“If there’s nothing more,” he said, his voice cold and harsh, “I think I’ll be going.”
“Sullen dog,” said Parlmee, when the door had closed behind the departing man.