He was willin’ to quit, all right, and the fun was over fer the day. After the game, I send a long telegram to Williams, the vice president, and tells him what a joke our new player was and that it was throwin’ money away to even pay his board, let alone that Fed’ral League sal’ry he was gettin’. I didn’t get no answer from Williams, but a letter come from the skirt. She give me a call for not sendin’ the telegram to her instead o’ Williams and ast me how could I judge if a man was a ball player when I hadn’t only saw him one day.
Well, I wires to Williams that I was through, because I’d signed to manage a ball club and not to run no burlesque show, but he jumps on a train and comes over to New York to see me. He says they was tryin’ to get her to sell out her stock and that him and the other directors appreciated what I’d did for the club and wanted me to stick.
So I stuck and went along the best I could. I didn’t pay no more attention to “Gertie” except to tell him to beat it to the clubhouse before the games started. He kept on comin’ out to the park, wherever we was playin’, and puttin’ on his unie, without no cap, and settin’ on the bench till the practice was over. Then he’d go in and put on one of his eight or nine different suits o’ clo’es, and go up in the stand and watch the game from there or else go to the matinée or somewheres.
I didn’t hardly ever say nothin’ to him, but I couldn’t make the rest o’ the bunch lay off. They tipped their hats whenever they seen him. While he was settin’ on the bench, they’d take a shot at him with the ball, and oncet or twicet they hit him, but not wheres it hurt him bad. He thought it was a accident when he got hit, but I knowed better. Every oncet in a while, somebody’d happen to step on his feet with their spikes, and then they’d beg his pardon. Some o’ them left their caps off while they was practicin’ and hollered “Ouch!” when they catched the ball. And on the train they’d get together and give college yells. He didn’t never get sore, and I don’t s’pose I would of neither if I’d been gettin’ five thousand for changin’ my clo’es a couple o’ times a day.
They tried to get him in the poker game, but they wasn’t nothin’ doin’. He says he liked to play bridge w’ist but that was all the cards he knowed. When we was on trains, he spent the time lookin’ at the scenery or readin’ magazines.
I remember one night when we was goin’ to Philly and he was settin’ acrost the aisle from I and Hub. He was readin’, and pretty soon he looks up from off of his magazine and says:
“You guys should ought to read this here story in here. It’s a baseball story and it’s about two teams bein’ tied for the pennant on the last day o’ the season, and one o’ the teams had a star pitcher that was sure to win the decidin’ game if nothin’ didn’t happen to him, so they stuck him in to pitch but in the first innin’ he strained his arm so it hurt him every ball he throwed but he didn’t say nothin’ about it, but kept on pitchin’ and win his game and the pennant, though he was sufferin’ terrible pain all the while. I call that nerve!”
“Nerve!” says Hub. “Say, that wasn’t nothin’ to what I seen come off in the Southern League the last year I was down there. The Nashville club that I was with and the New Orleans club was tied for first place, and we had to play a extra game to settle it. We had a first sacker named Smith that was the greatest I ever see. Up to the first of August he was battin’ .600 and it got so’s the pitchers wouldn’t give him nothin’ more to hit but walked him every time he come up. He offered to bat with one hand if they’d pitch strikes to him, but they wouldn’t take a chancet, and finally the umps’d just give him his base every time he come up without waitin’ for the four balls to be throwed.
“Well, it come time for this final game and we knowed we had it won if Smith was all right. The New Orleans club knowed it too, and they was out to get him. So when he got on in the first innin’ on a base on balls, their first baseman deliberately stepped on his foot and spiked him somethin’ awful. He couldn’t walk on that foot no more, but he wouldn’t quit, and after he’d drawed one of his bases on balls, every so often, he stole all the rest o’ the bases hoppin’ on his good foot.
“It come along the twenty-first innin’ and the score was six to six. He’d scored every one of our six runs by walkin’ to first and then hoppin’ the rest o’ the way. Well, he walked in the twenty-first and starts hoppin’ to second. The catcher knowed they was no use to throw to second or to third neither, because Smith was so fast, even on one foot, that he was bound to beat it. So the catcher just kept a hold o’ the ball, knowin’ Smith wouldn’t never stop till he got clear home. Along come Smith, hoppin’ for the plate, and the catcher run out to meet him, but he hopped clean over the catcher’s head and scored the run that beat
