KEWPIE AGREES
“Kewpie!”
“Yeah?”
“Come on over here!” It was Laurie calling from the doorway of No.
16. The door across the corridor opened, and the somewhat sleepy
countenance of Kewpie peered forth inquiringly. The hour was 9:40.
“What do you want?” asked Kewpie. “I’m just going to bed. I’m tired,
Nod.”
“You come over here,” was the stern, inexorable answer. “Ned and I want
to talk to you.”
“Well, gosh, I tell you I’m sleepy,” muttered Kewpie, but he crossed
the hall and followed Laurie into No. 16. Kewpie was chastely clad in
a suit of out-size pajamas, which were white with a broad blue stripe
at short intervals. Kewpie in night attire looked about half again as
large as he did when more or less confined in street costume. Laurie
thrust the visitor into the arm-chair. Kewpie subsided with a long
sigh and blinked wonderingly, first at Nid and then at the determined
Nod. Then he placed a large and pudgy hand in the neighborhood of his
face and yawned cavernously.
“What’s the matter with you fellows?” he inquired. “What are you
looking at me like that for?”
“Kewpie,” said Ned, “do you honestly think you can ever learn to pitch?”
“What!” Kewpie woke up a trifle. “I can pitch right now. Who says I
can’t?”
“I do,” said Laurie emphatically. “You can pitch now just about as well
as a toad can fly. What we want to know is whether, if you practise
hard and keep at it, you can learn.”
Kewpie looked hurt. “Say, what’s the matter with my drop-ball?” he
asked indignantly. “I suppose you think you could hit that, eh? Well,
I’d like to see you try it.”
“Cut out the bunk, Kewpie,” said Ned sternly. “We’re talking business
now. You know plaguey well you wouldn’t last ten seconds against
a batter, the way you’re pitching now. Laurie says you’ve got a
fair drop, when you get it right, and that’s all you have got. You
haven’t――haven’t―― What is it he hasn’t got, Laurie?”
“He hasn’t got anything except that drop. He can’t pitch a straight
ball with any speed――”
“I don’t want to. Any one can hit the fast ones.”
“And he hasn’t a curve to his name. About all he has got is a colossal
nerve.”
“Nerve yourself,” replied Kewpie. “I don’t pretend to be a Joe Bush,
or――or――”
“Can you learn?” demanded Ned. “If Laurie and I help every way we know
how, if you study that book of yours, if you practise hard every day
for――for two months, say, will you be able to pitch decently at the end
of that time?”
Kewpie was plainly puzzled by this sudden and intense interest in him;
puzzled and a trifle suspicious. “What do you want to know for?” he
asked slowly.
“Never mind. Answer the question.” Ned was very stern.
“Sure, I’d be able to pitch after two months. Bet you I’d have
everything there is.”
“All right,” replied Ned. “Here’s the dope. Laurie and Elk Thurston
and Nate Beedle and two or three more were talking in the gym this
afternoon, and Elk said you were no good and never would be able to
pitch, and――”
“Elk!” interrupted Kewpie contemptuously. “He’s just a big blow-hard, a
bluff, a――”
“Never mind that. Laurie said you _could_ pitch and that before the
season was over you’d be pitching on the nine. Get that?”
Kewpie nodded, glancing from one to the other of the twins, but he
seemed at a loss for words. Finally, though, he asked awedly, “Gosh,
Nod, did you tell ’em that?”
“Yes, like a blamed idiot I did! I guess I had a brain-storm or
something. Well, never mind that now. What do _you_ say?”
“Me?” Kewpie cleared his throat. “Well, now, look here, I never told
you I could pitch on the team, did I?”
“If you didn’t you might just as well have,” answered Laurie
impatiently. “You’ve been cracking yourself up for a month. Now, what
Ned and I want to know――”
“Well, but hold on! How would I get to pitch, with Nate Beedle and two
or three others there? Gosh, those sharks have been at it for years!”
“Never you mind how,” said Ned sharply. “That’s not the question.
Laurie’s gone and put himself in a hole, and you’ve got to help pull
him out. Will you do it?”
Kewpie was again silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “Sure,” he said
dubiously. “I’ll do what I can, but――”
“There aren’t any ‘buts,’” declared Ned. “If you’ll take hold seriously
and do your best and learn to pitch――well, fairly decently, Kewpie,
Laurie and I’ll look after the rest of it. We’ll see that you get your
chance somehow with the team.”
“How are you going to do it?” asked Kewpie.
Ned shrugged. “Don’t know yet. That’ll come later. Now, what do you
say? Will you be a game sport and buckle into it, or are you going to
throw us down? You’ll have to quit bluffing about what you can do and
work like the dickens, Kewpie. You’ll have to quit eating sweet stuff
and starchy things and get rid of about ten pounds, too. Well?”
Kewpie looked solemnly back at Ned for an instant. Then he nodded
shortly. “I’ll do it,” he said soberly. “Let’s go.”
The next day, which was a Saturday, the baseball candidates forsook
the gymnasium and went out on the field. The ground was still soft
in spots, and the diamond was not used. There was a long session at
the batting-net and plenty of fielding work to follow, and of course,
the pitching staff unlimbered and “shot ’em over” for awhile. Beedle,
Pemberton, and Croft comprised the staff at present, with two or
three aspirants applying for membership. George Pemberton fell to
Laurie’s share. Pemberton was not so good as Nate Beedle, but he had
done good work for the team last year and he was a “comer.” Laurie,
taking Pemberton’s shoots in his big mitten, for the first time since
he had been transferred from the out-field to a position behind the
plate, watched his pitcher’s work. Before this, Laurie had concerned
himself wholly with the ball. Now he gave attention to the behavior of
Pemberton, studying the latter’s stand, his wind-up, the way his body
and pitching arm came forward, the way the ball left his hand. More
than once Laurie became so engrossed with the pitcher that the ball
got by him entirely. He even tried to discern how Pemberton placed his
fingers around the sphere in order to pitch that famous slow one of
his that had foiled the best batsmen of the enemy last spring. But at
the distance Laurie couldn’t get it.
Pemberton was eighteen, tall, rather thin, rather awkward until he
stepped into the box and took a baseball in his capable hand. After
that he was as easy and graceful as a tiger. The difference between
Pemberton’s smooth wind-up and delivery and Kewpie’s laborious and
jerky performance brought Laurie a sigh of despair. As he stopped a
high one with his mitt and quite dexterously plucked it from the air
with his right hand, Laurie was more than ever convinced that the
campaign on which he and Ned and Kewpie had embarked last evening
so grimly and determinedly was foredoomed to failure. Gee! Kewpie
would never be able to pitch like George Pemberton if he lived to be
a hundred years old and practised twenty-four hours a day! Laurie
almost wished that he had been born tongue-tied! Later, returning to
the gymnasium, Laurie ranged himself beside Pemberton. He had provided
himself with a ball, and now he offered it to the pitcher. “Say,
George, show me how you hold it for that floater of yours, will you?”
he said.
Pemberton took the ball good-naturedly enough. “What are you trying
to do, Nod?” he asked. “Get my job away from me? Well, here’s the way
I hold it.” He placed his long fingers about the ball with careful
regard for the seams. “But holding it isn’t more than half of it,
Nod. You see, you’ve got to flip it away just right. Your thumb puts
the drag on it, see? When you let go of it it starts away like this.”
Pemberton swung his arm through slowly and let the ball trickle from
his hand. Laurie recovered it from a few paces away and stared at it
in puzzled fashion. He guessed he wouldn’t be able to learn much about
pitching that way. Pemberton continued his explanation carelessly.
“You see, you’ve got to start it off with the right spin. That’s what
keeps it up after a straight ball would begin to drop. Now you take the
‘fade-away.’ I can’t pitch it, but I know how it’s done. You start it
like this.”
Laurie listened and looked on with only perfunctory interest. It wasn’t
any use, he decided. Learning Pemberton’s stuff and teaching it to
Kewpie was beyond his abilities. Besides, when he came to think about
it, it didn’t seem quite fair. It was too much like stealing another
fellow’s patent. Of course there wasn’t more than one chance in ten
that Kewpie would progress to the stage where he might burst on the
Hillman’s baseball firmament as a rival to Pemberton, but ... just the
same.... The next time Pemberton let the ball go Laurie picked it up
and dropped it in his pocket.
The next day, Sunday, saw Ned and Laurie walking toward the Widow
Deane’s shortly after dinner was over. It had become a custom to go for
a walk on Sunday afternoons, when the weather was gracious, with Polly
and Mae and, sometimes, Bob Starling or some of the other fellows.
To-day, however, there were indications that a late dinner was still
going on at the Starlings’, and the twins didn’t stop for Bob. It had
rained during the night but a warm sun had long since removed all
signs of it. Along the streets bordering School Park doors and windows
were open to the spring-like air. In the park the few benches were
occupied, and, beyond, in the paved yard of the high school, some small
youths were indulging somewhat noisily in an amusement suspiciously
like baseball. Of course it couldn’t be baseball, as Laurie pointed
out, since the town laws sternly forbade that game on Sundays. At the
further corner of Pine Street a small white house with faded brown
shutters stood sedately behind a leafless and overgrown hedge of lilac.
The twins viewed the house with new interest, for it was there that
Miss Comfort lived. Ned thought that through a gap in the hedge he had
glimpsed a face behind one of the front windows.
“Reckon this is her last Sunday in the old home,” observed Ned. It
sounded flippant, and probably he had meant that it should, but inside
him he felt very sorry for the little old lady. It was not much of a
house, as houses went even in Orstead, but it was home to Miss Comfort,
and Ned suddenly felt the pathos of the impending departure.
Laurie grunted assent as they turned the corner toward the little blue
painted shop. “Guess we aren’t going to hear from the Goop,” he said.
“It’s three days now.”
“We――ell, he might be away or something,” answered Ned.
“I don’t believe so,” said Laurie. “He didn’t answer Miss Comfort’s
letter, and I guess he isn’t going to answer our telegram. The old
skinflint,” he added as an afterthought.