Dear Mr. Kane:—I am keeping track of your wonderful pitching and looking forward to seeing you when I return to New York, which will be early in the fall. I hope you haven’t forgotten me.
And so on, signed “Your friend and admirer, Evelyn Corey.”
Hurry didn’t answer only about half of them as it was a real chore for him to write. He addressed his answers in care of Mr. Harry Wade, such and such a street number, Montreal, and when Bull’s brother got them, he forwarded them to Bull, so he’d know if they was anything special he ought to reply to.
The boys took turns entertaining Kane evenings, playing cards with him and staking him to picture shows. Johnny Abbott done more than his share. You see the pennant meant more to Johnny than to anybody else; it meant the world’s series money and a fall wedding, instead of a couple of years’ wait. And Johnny’s gal, Helen Kerslake, worked, too. She had him to her house to supper—when her folks were out—and made him feel like he was even handsomer and more important than he thought. She went so far as to try and get some of her gal friends to play with him, but he always wanted to pet and that was a little too much.
Well, if Kane hadn’t stuck with us and turned out to be the marvel he is, the White Sox would have been so far ahead by the Fourth of July that they could have sat in the stand the rest of the season and let the Bloomer Girls play in their place. But Hurry had their number from the first time he faced them till the finish. Out of eleven games he worked against them all last year, he won ten and the other was a nothing to nothing tie. And look at the rest of his record! As I recall it, he took part in fifty-eight games. He pitched forty-three full games, winning thirty-six, losing five and tying two. And God knows how many games he saved! He had that free, easy sidearm motion that didn’t take much out of him and he could pitch every third day and be at his best.
But don’t let me forget to credit myself with an assist. Late in August, Kane told me he couldn’t stand it no longer to just get short notes from the Corey gal and never see her, and when we started on our September trip West, he was going to steal a week off and run up to Montreal; he would join us later, but he must see Evelyn. Well, for once in my life I had an idear hit me right between the eyes.
The Yuma gal, Minnie Olson, had been writing to him once a week and though he hardly ever wrote to her and seemed to only be thinking of Corey, still I noticed that he could hardly help from crying when Minnie’s letters came. So I suggested to Dave that he telegraph Minnie to come East and visit with all her expenses paid, wire her money for her transportation, tell her it would be doing Kane a big favor as well as the rest of us, and ask her to send Kane a telegram, saying when she would reach New York, but to be sure and never mention that she wasn’t doing it on her own hook.
Two days after Dave’s message was sent, Kane got a wire from El Paso. She was on her way and would he meet her at the Pennsylvania Station on such and such a date. I never seen a man as happy as Hurry was when he read that telegram.
“I knew she was stuck on me,” he said, “but I didn’t know it was that strong. She must have worked in a store or something since spring to save up money for this trip.”
You would have thought he’d never heard of or seen a gal by the name of Evelyn Corey.
Minnie arrived and was just what we expected: a plain, honest, good-hearted, small-town gal, dressed for a masquerade. We had supper with her and Kane her first night in town—I and Johnny and Helen. She was trembling like a leaf, partly from excitement over being in New York and amongst strangers, but mostly on account of seeing the big sap again. He wasn’t no sap to her and I wished they was some dame would look at me the way she kept looking at Hurry.
The next morning Helen took her on a shopping tour and got her fixed up so cute that you couldn’t hardly recognize her. In the afternoon she went to the ball game and seen Kane shut the Detroit club out with two hits.
When Hurry got a glimpse of her in her Fifth Avenue clothes, he was as proud as if he had bought them himself and it didn’t seem to occur to him that they must have cost more than she could have paid.
Well, with Kane happy and no danger of him walking out on us, all we had to worry about was that the White Sox still led us by three games, with less than twenty left to play. And the schedule was different than usual—we had to wind up with a Western trip and play our last thirteen games on the road. I and Johnny and Dave was talking it over one day and the three of us agreed that we would be suckers not to insist on Miss Olson going along. But Dave wondered if she wouldn’t feel funny, being the only girl.
“I’ll make my gal go, too,” said Johnny.
And that’s the way it was fixed.
We opened in St. Louis and beat them two out of three. Olds was trimmed, but Carney and Kane both won. We didn’t gain no ground, because the White Sox grabbed two out of three
