“That-a-boy!” said Healy. “Threaten ’em!”
“I mean what I say!” retorted Jake. “I ain’t goin’ to spend my life on no bench! I come here to play baseball!”
“Oh, you did!” said Healy. “And what do you think I come here for, to fish?”
“I ain’t talkin’ about you,” said Young Jake. “I’m talkin’ about myself.”
“That’s a novelty in a ball player,” remarked Lefty.
“And what I’m sayin’,” Jake went on, “is that I’m sick of settin’ on this bench.”
“This ain’t a bad bench,” said Healy. “They’s a hell of a lot worse places you might sit.”
“And a hell of a lot better places!” said Jake. “I can think of one right now. I’m lookin’ right at it.”
“Where at?”
“Right up in the old stand; the third—no, the fourth row, next to the aisle, the first aisle beyond where the screen leaves off.”
“I noticed her myself!” put in Lefty. “Damn cute! Too damn cute for a busher like you to get smoked up over.”
“Oh, I don’t know!” said Young Jake. “I didn’t get along so bad with them dames down South.”
“Down South ain’t here!” replied Lefty. “Those dames in some of those swamps, they lose their head when they see a man with shoes on. But up here you’ve got to have something. If you pulled that Calhoun County stuff of yours on a gal like that gal in the stand she’d yell for the dog catcher. She’d—”
“They’re all alike!” interrupted Mike Healy. “South, or here, or anywheres, they’re all the same, and all poison!”
“What’s poison?” asked Jake.
“Women!” said Healy. “And the more you have to do with ’em the better chance you’ve got of spendin’ your life on this bench. Why—That’s pitchin’, Joe!” he shouted when the third of the enemy batters had popped out and left a runner stranded at second base. “You look good in there today,” he added to Joe as the big pitcher approached the dugout.
“I’m all right, I guess,” said Joe, pulling on his sweater and moving toward the water bottle. “I wished that wind’d die down.”
The manager had come in.
“All right! Let’s get at ’em!” he said. “Nice work, Joe. Was that a fast one Meusel hit?”
“No,” said Joe. “A hook, but it didn’t break.”
“A couple of runs will beat ’em the way you’re going,” said the manager, stooping over to select his bat. “Make this fella pitch, boys,” he added. “He was hog wild in Philly the other day.”
The half inning wore on to its close, and the noncombatants were again left in possession of the bench. Young Jake addressed Healy.
“What’s women done to you, Mike?”
“Only broke me. That’s all!” said Healy.
“What do you mean, broke you! The boys tells me you ain’t spent nothin’ but the summer since you been in the league.”
“Oh, I’ve got a little money,” said Healy. “I don’t throw it away. I don’t go around payin’ ten smackers a quart for liquid catnip. But they’s more kinds of broke than money broke, a damn sight worse kinds, too. And when I say women has broke me, I mean they’ve made a bum out of my life; they’ve wrecked my—what-do-you-call-it?”
“Your career,” supplied Lefty.
“Yes, sir,” said Healy. “And I ain’t kiddin’, neither. Why say, listen: Do you know where I’d be if it wasn’t for a woman? Right out there in that infield, playin’ that old third sack.”
“What about Smitty?” asked Young Jake.
“He’d be where I am—on this bench.”
“Aw, come on, Mike! Be yourself! You don’t claim you’re as good as him!” Jake remonstrated.
“I do claim it, but it don’t make no difference if I am or I ain’t. He shouldn’t never ought to of had a chance, not on this club, anyway. You’d say the same if you knowed the facts.”
“Well, let’s hear ’em.”
“It’s a long story, and these boys has heard it before.”
“That’s all right, Mike,” said Gephart, a spare catcher. “We ain’t listened the last twelve times.”
“Well, it was the year I come in this league, four years ago this spring. I’d been with the Toledo club a couple of years. I was the best hitter on the Toledo club. I hit .332 the first year and .354 the next year. And I led the third basemen in fieldin’.”
“It would be hard not to,” interposed Lefty. “Anything a third baseman don’t get they call it a base hit. A third baseman ought to pay to get in the park.”
Healy glanced coldly at the speaker, and resumed:
“This club had Johnnie Lambert. He was still about the best third baseman in this league, but he was thirty-five years old and had a bad knee. It had slipped out on him and cost this club the pennant. They didn’t have no other third baseman. They lose sixteen out of twenty games. So that learned ’em a lesson, and they bought me. Their idear was to start Johnnie in the spring, but they didn’t expect his knee to hold up. And then it was goin’ to be my turn.
“But durin’ the winter Johnnie got a hold of some specialist somewheres that fixed his knee, and he come South with a new least of life. He hit good and was as fast as ever on the bases. Meanw’ile I had been on a huntin’ trip up in Michigan that winter and froze my dogs, and they ailed me so that I couldn’t do myself justice all spring.”
“I suppose it was some woman made you go huntin’,” said Gephart, but Healy continued without replying:
“They was a gal from a town named Ligonier, Indiana, that had visited in Toledo the second year I played ball there. The people where she was visitin’ was great baseball fans, and they brought her out to the game with them, and she got stuck on me.”
“Ligonier can’t be a town! It must be an asylum!” said Lefty.
“She got stuck on me,” Healy repeated, “and the people where she was stayin’ asked me to their house to supper. After supper the man and his wife said how about goin’ to the picture
