I showed the ball to the ump. He looked perplexed. “Runner’s out,” I prompted, and tossed it to him.
Then Craver was up and charging, his eyes crazy. Concentrate, I told myself, trying to resurrect basics from more than a decade before: chin tucked on shoulder, weight distributed on balls of feet, rocker steps. I could almost hear my coach’s litany: “Hands up! Chin down! Breathe!”
I stepped inside Craver’s wild charge, rocked forward and jabbed sharply, exhaling with a snort as I punched. There was a popping sound and blood gushed from Craver’s nose. He stopped and stared stupidly at droplets spattering to the ground. A hand clutched at my shoulder. I shook it off. There was shouting, a sudden confusion of straining bodies. I glimpsed Mac and Mart King struggling on the ground; Brainard and Fisher flailing at each other; Sweasy astride Flynn, clutching handfuls of long hair.
Craver came at me again. He brushed aside a parrying jab and jolted me with a right that exploded on my cheekbone, his fist slamming squarely into my unhealed cut. It felt as if my face had split like fruit.
I staggered back. Darkness hovered at the edges of my vision. Andy appeared suddenly, incongruously, on Craver’s back. The big man tore him loose, backhanded him, tossed him roughly. It afforded me precious seconds. I backpedaled and shook off my wooziness as Craver advanced, managing to halt him with another jab to his nose. Eyes glazed with pain, he reached out blindly. I crossed a right over his outstretched hands. He raised them reflexively when my fist thudded against his eye. I drove a left into his gut. His hands sagged again. Balanced, breathing in exaggerated puffs, I hooked him twice, then got my shoulder behind a straight right that staggered him and almost sent him down. Looking as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, he glared at me, one eye already swelling shut.
“Had enough, asshole?”
He crumpled to one knee and said nothing.
I moved closer and asked him again.
He’d decoyed me. With unbelievable swiftness a boot materialized in his hand and swiped upward at my face. The spikes grazed my chin as I wrenched my head back. I kicked at him wildly and threw everything I had as he came to his feet. I drove fists into his body, neck, face. Blood and sweat sprayed in a pink mist. Snarling, spewing incoherently, he kept coming as I circled him. Finally he stood weaving, his chest heaving with sobbing breaths.
I sent him spinning with a sloping left, then stepped forward to finish him—and my arms were pinned from behind by another Haymaker. Craver lurched forward, punched me on the forehead, then clamped me in a headlock. Even half-conscious, his strength was superhuman. I panicked as I felt my neck giving; desperately I gripped the encircling arm and wrenched it forward. We were so slippery with sweat that I popped free, nearly at the cost of my ears. As he wheeled I crashed a right squarely to his mouth. He fell forward, head sagging, and landed heavily on hands and knees. For a long moment he teetered, spitting blood and fragments of teeth. Then he fell sideways to the sod.
I raised my head wearily and saw a circle of staring players. “Mother of God!” said Hurley. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”
I shook my head, too exhausted to talk.
The King brothers lugged Craver off the field. The silent crowd looked on disbelievingly. The ump had little choice but to rule Craver out—he’d never touched the plate. The Haymakers’ frantic search of the rules turned up nothing to serve them.
Following the conventions of the time, we took our last ups, even though we’d won 32-31. Hits by George, Gould, and Waterman, plus halfhearted fielding by the Haymakers, gave us five more runs.
Knots of silent spectators dotted the field, staring as if we were alien creatures. It gave me the willies. For one frightening instant I thought I glimpsed the dark figure of Le Caron near the grandstand; then I realized it was only a cluster of shadows.
No songs or cheers followed this game. The Haymakers departed quickly. While Mac, looking no worse for his tangle with the behemoth Mart King, packed our two dozen bats into their huge sail-cloth bag—the rookie’s traditional chore—I pulled Millar’s sweater on over my jersey and headed for the booths, shoved in at the head of a line, and showed my betting slip.
“There’s a problem, chum,” said the pool seller, a thin-faced, fast-talking man.
“No problem,” I said. “Fork over two hundred.”
“Wait, you see—” He stopped and peered at me. “Ain’t you him that whipped Will Craver?”
“Yeah, and if you don’t—”
“You circled him like a cooper ’round a barrel, hammering his every side.” He flicked jabs at an imaginary opponent. “Why, it’s an honor to serve him who took Bull Craver’s measure.” He extended a wad of bills. “Him that’s wrecked every grogshop hereabouts, and most men in them too.”
I counted the money.
“If’n I was you Ohio boys,” he confided, “I’d keep a sharp eye out.”
“The crowd gets nasty?”
“Naw, they’re sheep. It’s the wolves I’d fear.”
I pocketed the money. “Gamblers?”
He winked slyly. “Red Jim was here at the commence of each inning, laying down three thousand without fail—a thousand for each Red Stocking out, he boasted.”
“So he lost . . .”
“Twenty-seven thousand.”
“Good God.”
“Word is it warn’t all his, neither. Some’s from John Morrissey--there’s one unlikely to stand for losing—and some straight from the Fenian treasury. If
