Timmy alone seemed free of self-consciousness. He steered conversation, insisting that I tell him everything I knew about baseball and the Stockings. He was ecstatic when I presented him with a bat I'd repaired with brads and glue, a light one that Hurley had cracked. I’d brought another ball, too, and we played catch while Cait made sandwiches.
“I fancy being a pitcher,” he said. “Is Mr. Brainard truly bigger on his throwing side, like Andy says?”
“Acey does look a little lopsided without a shirt on,” I said. “His right arm’s definitely longer, too.”
“Honor bright?”
I laughed. “Honor bright.”
He examined his own skinny arm. “You think someday . . .?”
“That’s a strong arm you’ve got, Samuel.”
“Like Christy Mathewson’s?”
“Could be.”
“Let’s make a pitcher’s box,” I said, tracing a rectangle on the ground with the bat. “We’ll use the tree as a backstop. You pitch and I’ll knock ’em back.”
“For a certainty, he’s taken to you,” Cait said later as we sat beneath the tree watching Timmy explore the meadow. “He’s often jealous if another takes my attention.”
“O’Donovan?” I said, and mentally kicked myself.
“Timothy doesn’t care for him, it’s true,” she said. “And Fearghus isn’t one for children. But he’s been good to us.”
“I see.” So far we’d stuck to safe topics like Timmy and Andy and childhood recollections of Ireland. Suddenly the terrain was uncertain.“Yes, truly, we’re obligated to Fearghus,” she said. “It’s troublesome to know he’d not accept my being here like this.”
“But here you are.”
“Yes, here I am.”
I stole a long look at her as she brushed an insect away. Her face, framed by the dark curls, looked almost fragile in its soft paleness. The silver ring glinted for an instant in the sun. There was so much we didn’t know about each other. But it was all right; I was where I was supposed to be. I rested my head on my coat and drowsed pleasurably beside her in the warm shade; not even inadvertently did we touch.
“Cait,” I breathed, not aware I’d said it out loud.
“Hmm?” she murmured.
“Oh, I . . . just said your name.”
She said tentatively, “Samuel.”It whispered among the rustlings of the grasses.
Later, walking back to the carriage, she said, “When I was a girl I would go each day to sit in a lovely green dell. It was my secret place.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s been so long since I’ve thought of that.”
I looked at her silently, in love beyond my depths.
“Thank you so much for bringing us, Samuel.”
The St. Louis Empires, “Champions of Missouri,” blew in early in the week, boasting of how their heavy strikers would beat new tunes on us. I doubted it, especially now that Allison was back. After practice Andy and I saw the end of their game against the Bucks. The visitors won, 27-14, but we knew they didn’t have a prayer against us.
The Empires were saved by rain, as it turned out. No longer boasting, they trailed 23-0 when a deluge ended matters in the top of the fourth. There would be no makeup, since we had to leave the next day.
Another train trip. We arrived in Milwaukee at suppertime, twenty-two hours after leaving Cincinnati. Missing no opportunity, Champion had scheduled a game the next day against the local Cream Citys. We stayed at the Lake House, a picturesque inn opposite Union Depot and the steamboat docks. The evening was warm, the sky streaked with vermilion and orange. Andy and I sat on our second-story veranda and gazed out at Lake Michigan.
“You ever miss bein’ back home?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” At this point “home” seemed an abstraction.
“Your friends and kin,” he persisted: “You still don’t recall much about ’em?”
“It sort of seems like they’re all dead.”
“You must feel some cut off.”
“At times.”
“I guess you don’t want to go into it.”
“There just isn’t much to say, Andy.”
“Okay,” he said, unconvinced. We sat in silence as the last sunlight disappeared and the lake turned vibrant blue and then purple.
In the morning we got the obligatory city tour. The featured highlight was the National Military Asylum, a forbidding edifice filled with semicomatose patients and equipment so primitive I couldn’t understand how anybody survived hospitalization. The others seemed impressed by the facility. God help them. Anyway, the grounds were beautiful.
Everywhere in Milwaukee people stared at us and exclaimed, “The Red Stockings! The champion ballists!” Shortly before three we were escorted to Cream City Park, where we found the grounds crowded with some three thousand spectators. The field was rough and pebbly, making every ground ball dangerous.
The “CC’s” were Wisconsin champs, but they hadn’t faced anybody like us. I got a kick out of watching them gape at the shots from our bats and contort themselves trying to connect with Brainard’s tosses. By the end of seven innings, when an end was mercifully called, we had hammered seventy-seven hits for a hundred and forty-seven bases. George went ten for ten, including two long homers, three doubles, a triple, and six steals. Harry, true to form, refused to let us ease up. The poor CC’s managed only nine hits. The final score was 85-7.
When we left for Chicago on the overnight steamer Manitowoe, a number of the CC’s were on board. “Wanna see you face the Rockfords,” one explained. “Everybody within five hundred miles’ll be there.”
He was hardly exaggerating. The atmosphere in Chicago rivaled Troy before the Haymaker game or Brooklyn before we met the Mutes. The Forest Citys, touring triumphantly after the narrow loss to us, had defeated the Buckeyes, 40-1; Mansfield, 83-14; Detroit, 32-10. They were riding high again.
Champion and no fewer than two hundred Cincinnati club members met us at Chicago’s steamer dock and took us to the Revere House, where we banqueted with the Forest Citys. We learned that huge delegations were on hand from Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland—plus virtually the whole town of Rockford—and that
