TREACHERY?
Spring swung swiftly onward toward June and the finals,――the
examinations toward which every fellow in the school had been looking
forward since mid-year with a certain amount of worry and not a few
misgivings. And one after another the games on the baseball schedule
were becoming history as each Saturday and Wednesday slipped by. Each
game was becoming harder now, for the Pennington team was reaching
the stiffest part of its schedule. But the team was making a fine
record in spite of the strong combinations that the players were
pitted against. Bedford Hall was well trounced in a sizzling game that
brought out all sorts of fine baseball; Carlton Hill Prep was defeated
by a narrow margin; Brunswick, the hard-hitting champions of Sussex
County Scholastic League, were beaten in a ten-inning game, and even
the Princeton Freshmen were humbled after an extra-inning session that
reached a dramatic climax when Wade Grenville poled out a home run
right after a smashing double by Buck Hart. Binghamton High, Hanover
Prep and the Crescent Club of Dover were humbled successively, and
the Pennington team seemed to be moving along irresistibly toward a
complete clean-up of its schedule, when quite suddenly it received
a setback that probably did the team more good than several more
victories.
The Washington-Childs School team came to Pennington. It was a little
school and actually a little team. The nine was composed of boys
none of whom was older than seventeen, and many of them looked to be
about fifteen. They were all short, stocky, sturdy players except the
pitcher, who was the giant of the squad, a long, rangy country boy with
hands as big as fielders’ mitts; at least they looked that big as they
dangled at the ends of his grotesquely long lean arms. His feet were
big and his face was big and round and good-natured and covered with
freckles that ranged from the size of pinheads to some the size of a
dime. He looked more like a country clown than a baseball player, and
the Pennington boys looked at him and smiled. Here, they thought, was
a break in their stiff schedule. This would be a romp; a veritable
walkaway, and unfortunately they went onto the field with that attitude
of mind.
Their supreme confidence was elevated to the heights of absolute
conceit, after the first inning, for the visiting team was set down
hitless while they poled out three safe drives off of the freckle-faced
pitcher’s delivery which netted them a run. It certainly looked easy.
But the confident Penningtons soon discovered that things are not
always the way they look from first appearances. Somehow, it really
looked as if it were an accident, one of the Washington players landed
on George Dixon’s delivery for a two-bagger in the second inning and
the next man up placed a neat sacrifice hit between first and second
and advanced the runner to third. Then in business-like fashion the
next player up, a lad not a day older than fifteen, slammed a single
just out of reach of Mickey Daily, and the man on third romped home.
The inning ended with the next man up, but the score was tied.
The Pennington players came in, slightly puzzled to understand just how
it all happened. They were still quite certain that it had all been an
accident and they decided to alter the score right there in the last
of the second and take a lead that would just about discourage the
visiting team.
But accidents seemed to continue to happen. Jed Stafford, always a
reliable hitter, was the first man up, and the good-natured face full
of freckles in the pitcher’s box proceeded to bend some mystifying
curves over the plate that Jed could only marvel at but could not
possibly find with the end of his bat. It took four pitched balls to
send Jed back to the bench, as puzzled as ever.
“Jiminy, that boy has something on the ball, believe me,” he assured
Coach Rice.
“Hum, I noticed you didn’t have anything on the end of your bat,” said
the coach sarcastically; “you fanned like a novice. I guess when you
kids get through you’ll know you’ve been up against a pitcher. He’s
just about the best man to step in that pitcher box this season or I
miss my guess.”
The coach was right. He of the long arms and the freckles made the
heavy hitting Dutch Hecht, the next man up, look like an amateur. He
gave him three balls, at which Hecht refused to strike, and then he
proceeded to bend three more over the plate in such fashion that Dutch
simply grunted as he swung at the last.
About that time the opposing catcher began to liven up, too, and talk a
little. And the line of baseball “guff” he handed out completely took
the wind out of the next batter’s sails, and he fanned, too. Pennington
had gone down one, two, three,――three successive strike outs, an
“accident” that had not happened to the team all season.
To be sure, the fellows took a brace right there. Their conceit had
been nicely taken down and they decided that the only way they could
beat the combination they were facing was to take them seriously and
play their hardest. They did. But somehow their hardest did not seem
to amount to much. The visiting players, with all the confidence in
the world, waded right into George Dixon and spattered hits around the
diamond and outfield something scandalous, and while the Pennington
players did their best to keep these hits from developing into runs,
their best was none too good and five runs did slip through.
As for the opposing pitcher, he of the freckles, long arms and a
smile, there seemed to be nothing in the way of curves that he could
not deliver to perfection when he had to. He had slow balls and swift
balls, too, floaters and a mystifying assortment of almost everything
in the pitching line, and the result was he made the Pennington players
look like a lot of sand-lot kids. Indeed when the dust finally settled
and the game was neatly folded away in the official score book, the
Pennington players discovered that the Washington pitcher had left a
humiliating record behind him. He struck out ten men, and allowed six
hits from which they managed to get one run, and that in the first
inning. That was all. They had been defeated to the tune of 5 to 1. The
worst beating they had received during the entire season so far.
“Crackey,” said Wade Grenville to Jeff, in the locker room after the
game, “I never faced anything like that for pitching. He’s going to be
one of the best pitchers in the country when he gets three years more
on his shoulders. There didn’t seem to be a thing he couldn’t make the
ball do.”
“It surely was air-tight pitching. I begin to think we don’t know a
thing about the game the way they trimmed us. Some pitching, I’ll say.”
“He was a wiz. I’d almost believe he was a ringer,――a semi-pro. or
something like that,” said Buck Hart disconsolately, as he pulled off
one cleated shoe and threw it into his locker.
“Oh, he’s no ringer,” said Coach Rice, who came up in time to hear
Buck’s remark. “He’s an honest-to-goodness student at Washington-Childs
and he sure had you fellows looking like a lot of posts.”
“I’ll tell the world,” said big George Dixon; “I’ll tell ’em, too,
that he’s no ringer, either. I know who he is. He’s Badger Clark, a
fellow from Iowa; rich ranchman’s son; and I’ve heard that Yale and
Harvard and Princeton are all trying to make him believe that he’ll
make the mistake of his life if he doesn’t register at their particular
institution next year.”
“Well, whoever gets him will be mighty fortunate,” said Coach Rice.
But that defeat, coming as it did in the tightest and hardest part
of the Pennington schedule, really helped the fellows, for whatever
conceit and overconfidence had been accumulating as a result of their
succession of victories disappeared over night. They suddenly realized
that they were just a baseball team and not a lot of champions, and
they settled down to afternoon practice with more of a feeling that
practice was necessary than they had had heretofore.
The team had not undergone any radical changes during the season.
Rabbit Warren, Cas Gorham and Brownie Davis, the three first string
substitutes, were given a number of chances to fill in for regulars
who were taken out for some reason or another, and Gould, who still
reported for each game in uniform, was given an occasional opportunity
to fill in for Thatcher, Buck Hart or Mickey Daily; but he was listed
as being among the substitutes and Thatcher became the permanent third
baseman of the team, clinching his hold on the position by playing a
steady and dependable game as he well knew how to play, giving his best
to the team and occasionally flashing bits of brilliant baseball that
pleased the coach and his assistant and made the rest of the players
proud of him. He was Third Base Thatcher and living up to his name.
But Gould hung on despite the discouragement of losing his job as a
regular. He hung on for much the same reason that Jeff had been eager
to become a fixture on the team. Gould was a Sophomore, and as a
Freshman the preceding year he had been a substitute third baseman, but
he had not been given the privilege of playing in the Lawrencetown game
and thereby winning his letters,――winning the privilege of wearing a
buff “P” on cap and blue jersey. He wanted that honor. He wanted to win
his letters and that was the one reason why he stuck to the squad as a
substitute, hoping, of course, that chance, or luck, or something would
make it possible for him to play in the Lawrencetown game long enough
to be entitled to that privilege.
The school ruling was that to win a letter for baseball a player had to
play in seven scheduled games during one season, but one of those seven
games had to be the game with Lawrencetown. Gould had taken part in
more than seven games and so had Jeff, but it was necessary for both of
them to play in the Lawrencetown game before they could be awarded the
honor they strove for. So Gould clung on, although it was evident that
Thatcher had made the regular position at third, hoping no doubt that
something would happen, or that Coach Rice would relent at the last
moment, as coaches frequently do, and shove him into the game just so
that he could earn his letter.
But as the schedule was played it began to look as if there was small
opportunity for Gould to get the chance he was looking for. Coach
Rice did not seem to consider him with any more favor than he had
immediately after the Fayville High School game. He made Gould earn
every opportunity to play at all, and he demanded every bit as much
energy and loyalty and attention to practice as he did from the regular
players.
Gould was not of the temperament to accept a situation of this sort
with good grace. The humiliation he had suffered at being put among
the substitutes had been a bitter pill for him to swallow, but to be
continued as a second-string man while he watched Thatcher make good in
his old job hurt his natural conceit and pride more than he was willing
to admit even to himself.
He went about with a perpetual grouch, and he did far less bragging
than he had done before. He became very unpopular in his class, too,
because of the disposition he developed, and there were few of his
former friends who appeared to care very much about him. Yet in spite
of it all one boy clung to him as closely as ever and seemed to admire
him as much as he had in former days. That was Birdie Pell. It seemed
very strange to most of the fellows that this should be so. Jeff,
for one, could not understand why the little Sophomore should still
insist on chumming with Gould, who to appearances had developed into a
thoroughly unpleasant person. Others tried to understand it, too, and
failing, classed Birdie Pell in the same category as Gould, and as a
result had very little to do with him. Yet this seemed to make but very
little difference to Pell, for he went blithely on his way of palling
with Gould, until they became a thoroughly lonesome couple, finding
their own pleasures and developing their own interests.
Jeff devoted a great deal of thought to this strange companionship and
tried to analyze the reason for it. But in the end he had to give it up
as a problem too deep for him to solve. For some reason he liked Birdie
in spite of his associations and some unpleasant faults of personality.
And Pell seemed to think well of him, for even though Gould hated Jeff
with a hate that was almost sinister Birdie was always pleasant to
Thatcher even in Gould’s company. When they passed Thatcher on the
campus, though Gould glowered and looked ugly, Birdie always smiled
and had a cheery word, and in the halls of the school buildings Pell
frequently stopped to chat just a moment with Thatcher while classes
were changing.
As the spring term drew on toward June and the time for final
examinations, Jeff found that he had a lot more to think about than
baseball. School work was piling up fast and getting stiffer and
stiffer for the entire year was being reviewed and new work was being
crowded in as well. With the examinations looming ahead, Jeff, and most
of the other fellows, were cramming hard, burning the midnight oil, so
to speak, whenever they could find opportunity.
Especially were the baseball men studying hard, for there was a
scholastic rule at Pennington that no boy could play on any of the
athletic teams representing the school unless his school standing was
all that it should be.
The final examinations were scheduled for the eighth of June and
the last and crucial game of the season, the Lawrencetown game, was
scheduled for the following Saturday, which was the fifteenth of June,
and all of the players realized that to be eligible for the big game
of the season they would all have to pass the examinations with flying
colors.
And besides this highly important reason Jeff had still another reason
for wanting to make a good showing in his studies. The other reason was
Mr. Davidson, the President of the Third National Bank, who was making
it possible for Jeff to remain at Pennington. During the school term
Jeff had written repeatedly to his benefactor just by way of keeping
in touch with him and informing him of his school standing, and the
few letters that he had received in answer to his messages were always
hearty, encouraging and very cheerful. Indeed Mr. Davidson maintained
what almost amounted to a fatherly interest in Jeff, and especially was
he interested in his baseball career.
Several times he had motored over to Pennington of a Saturday afternoon
and watched the team play, and he was always very careful to seek out
Jeff and have a cheerful chat with him before the boy went back to the
locker room.
Realizing this interest in him, Jeff studied hard as the final
examinations approached. Indeed he soon became a veritable “bone,”
to quote Wade Grenville, who frequently had to roar to Jeff to turn
out the light and come to bed. In truth Jeff became so serious over
his studies that he often carried one text book or another about with
him, snatching odd moments to study. Especially did he carry around
his Cæsar, for he realized that he was weaker in his Latin than in any
other study. And strange to relate it was this conscientious habit that
brought Jeff Thatcher no end of trouble and resulted in a situation
that threatened again to wreck his whole career at Pennington.
Jeff carried his Cæsar in his outside jacket pocket most of the time,
and one day early in June, having a half hour to spare before climbing
into his uniform for practice he sat in the sun on the gym. steps and
thumbed over his translations, committing a particularly hard passage
to memory. He worked at it right up until the time the other members of
the squad began to arrive in the gym., then, as he thought, he slipped
the book into his pocket and went down stairs to the locker room to
undress and put on his baseball uniform, leaving his school clothes in
his locker, which unfortunately was not all that its name implied, for
it did not always lock with safety.
He spent about three hours on the field with the rest of the squad, and
then, returning late to the gym., he dressed and started for his room.
Arriving there, he felt for his Cæsar and discovered that it was not
in the pocket in which he felt certain he had slipped it. He started
to trace back in his memory to see if he could recall just when he had
used the book last and remembered that he had been sitting on the gym.
steps studying for some time before he went to the locker room. He
wondered whether he could have left the book lying on the steps, and to
make certain he retraced his steps to the gym. and began to look around
in the gathering twilight.
Mr. Clarkson came out of the gym. door while he was looking and, seeing
him, asked if he were looking for a book.
“Why, yes. My Cæsar, sir. I must have left it here, though I could have
sworn I put it in my pocket.”
“I saw a junior school boy pick up a book on the steps here not
an hour ago. I was going into the gym. as he was coming out, and I
suggested that he take it over to the office. I guess you’ll find it
there,” said the assistant coach as he passed on.
Jeff hurried over to the office only to discover that it was six
o’clock and the door was locked. Dr. Livingston and his assistants had
evidently left the building for the day.
“Oh, well, I’ll get it in the morning. I’ve got that bloomin’
translation almost pat now, anyhow, so I won’t worry. I’ll try and
bone up on algebra to-night. I’ll pick up the book first thing in the
morning,” he assured himself, as he hurried off to his room to dress
for dinner.
But he had no time to go to the office before breakfast next morning,
and he lingered so long in the dining room that he came very near being
late for chapel, and consequently had no time to retrieve his lost book
before the regular morning exercises.
However, he had the missing text book on his mind, and therefore he was
not disturbed when Dr. Livingston, while making announcements from the
platform, asked that he report in the office before the first period.
Jeff concluded that the Headmaster wanted to give him his book, and,
perhaps a bit of a scolding for carelessness.
After chapel Jeff walked over to the office and, after knocking,
entered. Dr. Livingston was evidently plunged in deep thought. When he
looked up, at Jeff’s entrance, Thatcher noticed that there was a pained
and discouraged expression on his face. He looked at Jeff unsmilingly
as the boy crossed the office and stood beside his desk, and Jeff was
puzzled and a little worried by his expression.
On the Headmaster’s desk Jeff noticed his Cæsar. He smiled then and
reached for it.
“I guess I was a little careless, Dr. Livingston, I must have left it
on the gym. steps.”
“Is that where you left it, Thatcher?” asked the Headmaster, almost
wearily, as he laid his hand on the book to prevent Jeff from picking
it up.
“Why, I must have. That’s where it was found, wasn’t it, sir?” asked
Jeff in a puzzled tone.
“Yes, that is where it was found. I――I――rather hoped――” The Headmaster
stopped talking. It was evident to Jeff that there was something
unpleasant on his mind,――something that discouraged him,――made him
feel that all his efforts to train his boys had gone for naught. Jeff
thought that his carelessness at leaving the book around could not be
responsible for all of the Master’s apparent emotion and he wondered
what on earth could have happened. He was presently to know.
“Thatcher,” said Dr. Livingston, clearing his throat and looking at
Jeff searchingly, “a really terrible thing has happened,――a terrible
crime has been committed here in school and circumstances point to you
as the criminal!”
The last was snapped out with such startling emphasis that Jeff grew
weak and nervous. He felt as if his stomach had suddenly melted away,
and that he was nothing but head and legs with no connection between.
For a moment he could not find voice to speak. When he did his voice
was nervous and apprehensive.
“But――but――Dr. Livingston, I don’t understand. I――er――what is it?”
“Room 44 has evidently been entered, for an examination paper has
disappeared,” snapped out the Headmaster, watching Jeff’s face
carefully to see the effect of his words.
Jeff was stunned. Of all offenses at Pennington this was certainly the
most serious. To enter Room 44 at any time and under any circumstances
was the most dishonorable thing that a student could do. This was the
room in which the examination papers were prepared and kept. All of
the students were aware of this fact and honor bound to respect the
restrictions that none was to enter that room under any conditions.
Some one in school had violated this trust and suspicion pointed to him!
“How――why――this is terrible, Dr. Livingston. But――but why do you
suspect me, sir?” asked Jeff.
For answer Dr. Livingston took his hand from the book before him and
lifted the cover. Inside the fly leaf, neatly folded, Jeff saw a sheet
of light green paper which he recognized only too well as the form in
which the examinations in Latin were always printed at Pennington.
“Your book was found, Thatcher, with this in it,” said Dr. Livingston
wearily.