HOT WORDS
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.