As Lewis Morris cantered back from his visit to Sugar Grove, he met Cyrus Ayres, driving homeward from town, his lumber-wagon making a great din as it rattled and rumbled over the rough, frozen road. The two young men exchanged greetings as they passed, and Cyrus call out to Lewis something which the noise of the wagon drowned; so, turning back, he said, “What was that you were saying about Bill Van Orman?”
“Oh, I only said that Bill is to be catcher in the new nine. I was in Jase Elderkin’s store, just now, and he allowed that Bill would take anything the boys had a mind to give him. But Charlie King and Ben Burton said that Larry Boyne wouldn’t want to serve as catcher, if he did go into the new nine, and that Bill would be the next best man, and Larry would go on one of the bases. Say first base. How’s that, think ye?”
“I don’t like it,” said Lewis, “but we’ll see what we shall see. I am willing, so far as I am concerned, to leave it all to Larry. He has got a level head, and don’t you forget it.”
“Right you are,” responded Cyrus, as, giving the reins to his impatient team, he rattled noisily down the river road.
As he passed Judge Howell’s handsome house, Lewis looked up and caught the glance of Miss Alice, who was sitting in the window-seat, curled up on a big cushion, and scribbling something that seemed to puzzle her very much. The girl wrote, rewrote, erased and wrote again. Finally she held her work, somewhat blurred and scratchy as it was, at arm’s length, and said in soliloquy,
“I really think that is the very best thing that could be done! But I wonder what I put that young Irishman’s name at the head of the list for?”
With a faint pink tint suffusing her cheek, she drew a line through the name at the top of the page, wrote it at the bottom, and then laughed softly to herself. Just then Lewis Morris rode by, gallantly taking off his cap as he passed the house. If Mr. Lewis could have looked over Alice’s shoulder, he would have read this list of names:
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S. Morrison, L.F.
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Neddie Ellis, C.F.
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Charlie King, P.
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Hart Stirling, 2nd B.
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John Brubaker, R.F.
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Hiram Porter, 1st B.
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Ben Burton, S.S.
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Wm. Van Orman, 3rd B.
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Lawrence Boyne, Catcher
Alice concealed the paper in her pocket, as she saw her father drive up the road from the bridge. Then she took it out again with a pretty little air of determination, saying to herself. “My papa knows that I am so much interested in the new nine scheme, why shouldn’t I tell him that this is what I think about the reorganization?”
So, when the Judge, that night, drew his motherless child to his knee, she brought to him the list of players which she had made out.
“Perhaps you will think it mannish in me, papa,” she said, “but I have made out a list of the players in the new Catalpa nine. I have a whim that this is about the way they will be placed.”
The Judge took the crumpled and blurred paper, and running his eyes over it, said, “That is a good cast, as they say in the theaters, Alice; but don’t you think you are a little premature? The new nine is not yet formed, and until they begin to practice they can hardly tell where each player should be placed. I don’t pretend to know much about the game; not so much as my little daughter does, for example, but isn’t that about the way it strikes you?”
Alice admitted that her father was right. But she had given a great deal of thought to the matter. Everybody in the town was discussing this absorbing topic. And, out of all that she had heard, she had evolved this cast of characters, so to speak. Anticipating the story of the Catalpa nine a little, it may be said that Alice Howell’s list, although its features were known only to herself and her father, was adopted with two exceptions, Larry Boyne was chosen to the third base and Bill Van Orman took the position of catcher. But this was not done until far later in the winter, when the new nine was finally organized for the summer campaign.
V
Notes of Preparation
On the ridge above the town of Catalpa stands a huge building known as “The Fair Building.” When the Northern District Agricultural Fair was held in Catalpa, this structure was used for displays of mammoth squashes, women’s handiwork, exhibits of flax, wheat, flour, and the other products of the fertile region of Northern Illinois. Now it was given over to desolation and neglect. The men who had helped to pay for its erection were not willing to signify by tearing it down that they had given up all hope of ever winning back to Catalpa the institution that had moved away up to the northern part of the state. Some of these days, they said, the Fair would come back to Catalpa, and then the building would be ready for the show, as of old.
The promoters of the new baseball club scheme had no difficulty in securing permission for the players to practice in the building. Accordingly, when the leisure days of winter came on, the lads betook themselves to the lonesome and barnlike structure and warmed themselves with the exercise that pitching, catching and running made needful.
“If we had had this old ark built for us,” said Hiram Porter, whose father was one of the Directors of the Agricultural Society, “it couldn’t have been better planned. Suppose we call a ball sent up there where Marm Deyo used
