“I tell you it is not mere brute muscle that our fellows want,” said Squire Mead, one of the great lights of the town, “it’s not brawn, but skill, that they must acquire before they can stand up against the baseball players of this part of the country. Let them pay more attention to work, and less to frills, and they will come out all right.”
But Dr. Selby, whose son was one of the rising players in the less aristocratic Dean County Nine, would have none of this sort of argument. Tom Selby was not only a wiry and agile player in the field, but he was the best oarsman on the river, and he could lift a barrel of flour, properly slung, “without turning a hair.” He had done it often. His father believed in muscle.
“Now there’s Bill Van Orman, the Dean County Nine’s catcher,” Dr. Selby would say, “who is like an ox in appearance, and I really believe could stave in the panel of that door with one blow of his fist, but who gets about the bases as spry as a cat, and who has got down the curve to such a fine point that nobody can pitch like him in half a dozen counties. Sam Ellis, the champion pitcher of the Jonesvilles, cannot hold a candle to Van’s pitching. And do you pretend to tell me that any light-waisted young fellow, like Will Sprague, for instance, could ever, by all the training in the world, make such a catcher or such a pitcher as Bill?”
It was the old question over again—skill against muscle. But Judge Howell, whose opinions on all subjects whatever commanded respect, probably gave voice to the average public judgment when he said, “What we want, gentlemen, is muscle and training. I am confident that in this good town of Catalpa there are more than nine young men who can give time to the practice necessary for the purpose, and who are endowed by nature with the requisite powers for the development of first-rate baseball players.”
“Good for you, Jedge!” It was Tony May, an aged and disreputable loafer in the store where this debate was taking place, who spoke. Tony was usually called “Rough and Ready” because of his frequent use of that phrase as applied to himself. Having applauded the Judge’s remark, he drew back, a little confusedly, and murmured “ ’Scuse me, Jedge, I didn’t mean to be interruptious, but you know I’m rough and ready, rough and ready, Jedge, and that ’ere remark of yourn does seem to be about the fust sensible thing I’ve hearn in this ’ere jag of words. ’Scuse me, Jedge, fer sayin’ so; you know I’m rough and I’m ready.” And the speaker subsided into a corner pulling his coonskin cap down over his shaggy brows.
Judge Howell, with an additional stiffness perceptible in his manner, waved his hand towards the dry goods boxes in the angles of which “Rough and Ready” had dropped and said, “Our friend here is enthusiastic. He has a right to be. His son Fremont has certainly distinguished himself, before now, as the right fielder of the Dean County Nine. But does anybody know if that handsome young Irish lad, Larry Boyne, could be drawn from the Jonesville Nine, in case we should desire to reinforce our home nine by drafts on foreign material, so to speak?”
Nobody knew; but Jason Elderkin, the storekeeper, leaned over his counter, pausing in his occupation of measuring off a yard of Kentucky jean, and said:
“I tell you what it is, Judge, that’s the likeliest young fellow in these parts. He lives with his mother over to Sugar Grove, and started in to read law with ’Squire Welby, over to Dean Center; but he had to give it up on account of his father’s being killed by being crushed under a tree that he was felling. Awful blow to the boy, likewise to his ma. The Jonesvilles pay him something for playing with them; so I’ve hearn tell.”
This suggestion created a momentary stir in the congress, for the gathering had by this time assumed such a character. Two or three of the speakers did not see how anybody could think of making a professional club out of an amateur, such as the Jonesville Nine pretended to be. If Larry Boyne was paid a salary, why were not others? And if salaries were paid to the men, it was a professional club, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know enough about what we may call the etiquette of the game to decide what is an amateur and what a professional club,” remarked Judge Howell, in slow and dignified accents. “But if we are in earnest in this proposition to organize a really creditable baseball club in Catalpa, and I take it that we are,”—and here he glanced at “Rough and Ready,” who had slid forward into sight again—“and I take it that we are, I say, we may as well make up our minds to put our hands into our pockets and help the boys a little, otherwise we shall go down again.”
“Right as a trivet, Jedge,” cried Rough and Ready. “Right as a trivet; for unless we take hold all together, we shell go down to where flour is nine dollars a bar’l and no money to buy it at that; ’scuse me, gen’lemen, but I’m rough and ready, you know. I allow that the Jedge here speaks
