And Ike goes up there with orders to bunt and cracks the first ball into that right-field stand! It was fair this time, and we’re two ahead, but I didn’t think about that at the time. I was too busy watchin’ Cap’s face. First he turned pale and then he got red as fire and then he got blue and purple, and finally he just laid back and busted out laughin’. So we wasn’t afraid to laugh ourselfs when we seen him doin’ it, and when Ike come in everybody on the bench was in hysterics.
But instead o’ takin’ advantage, Ike had to try and excuse himself. His play was to shut up and he didn’t know how to make it.
“Well,” he says, “if I hadn’t hit quite so quick at that one I bet it’d of cleared the center-field fence.”
Cap stopped laughin’.
“It’ll cost you plain fifty,” he says.
“What for?” says Ike.
“When I say ‘bunt’ I mean ‘bunt,’ ” says Cap.
“You didn’t say ‘bunt,’ ” says Ike.
“I says ‘Lay it down,’ ” says Cap. “If that don’t mean ‘bunt,’ what does it mean?”
“ ‘Lay it down’ means ‘bunt’ all right,” says Ike, “but I understood you to say ‘Lay on it.’ ”
“All right,” says Cap, “and the little misunderstandin’ will cost you fifty.”
Ike didn’t say nothin’ for a few minutes. Then he had another bright idear.
“I was just kiddin’ about misunderstandin’ you,” he says. “I knowed you wanted me to bunt.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you bunt?” ast Cap.
“I was goin’ to on the next ball,” says Ike. “But I thought if I took a good wallop I’d have ’em all fooled. So I walloped at the first one to fool ’em, and I didn’t have no intention o’ hittin’ it.”
“You tried to miss it, did you?” says Cap.
“Yes,” says Ike.
“How’d you happen to hit it?” ast Cap.
“Well,” Ike says, “I was lookin’ for him to throw me a fast one and I was goin’ to swing under it. But he come with a hook and I met it right square where I was swingin’ to go under the fast one.”
“Great!” says Cap. “Boys,” he says, “Ike’s learned how to hit Marquard’s curve. Pretend a fast one’s comin’ and then try to miss it. It’s a good thing to know and Ike’d ought to be willin’ to pay for the lesson. So I’m goin’ to make it a hundred instead o’ fifty.”
The game wound up 3 to 1. The fine didn’t go, because Ike hit like a wild man all through that trip and we made pretty near a cleanup. The night we went to Philly I got him cornered in the car and I says to him:
“Forget them alibis for a wile and tell me somethin’. What’d you do that for, swing that time against Marquard when you was told to bunt?”
“I’ll tell you,” he says. “That ball he throwed me looked just like the one I struck out on in the first innin’ and I wanted to show Cap what I could of done to that other one if I’d knew it was the third strike.”
“But,” I says, “the one you struck out on in the first innin’ was a fast ball.”
“So was the one I cracked in the ninth,” says Ike.
IV
You’ve saw Cap’s wife, o’ course. Well, her sister’s about twict as good-lookin’ as her, and that’s goin’ some.
Cap took his missus down to St. Louis the second trip and the other one come down from St. Joe to visit her. Her name is Dolly, and some doll is right.
Well, Cap was goin’ to take the two sisters to a show and he wanted a beau for Dolly. He left it to her and she picked Ike. He’d hit three on the nose that afternoon—off’n Sallee, too.
They fell for each other that first evenin’. Cap told us how it come off. She begin flatterin’ Ike for the star game he’d played and o’ course he begin excusin’ himself for not doin’ better. So she thought he was modest and it went strong with her. And she believed everything he said and that made her solid with him—that and her makeup. They was together every mornin’ and evenin’ for the five days we was there. In the afternoons Ike played the grandest ball you ever see, hittin’ and runnin’ the bases like a fool and catchin’ everything that stayed in the park.
I told Cap, I says: “You’d ought to keep the doll with us and he’d make Cobb’s figures look sick.”
But Dolly had to go back to St. Joe and we come home for a long serious.
Well, for the next three weeks Ike had a letter to read every day and he’d set in the clubhouse readin’ it till mornin’ practice was half over. Cap didn’t say nothin’ to him, because he was goin’ so good. But I and Carey wasted a lot of our time tryin’ to get him to own up who the letters was from. Fine chanct!
“What are you readin’?” Carey’d say. “A bill?”
“No,” Ike’d say, “not exactly a bill. It’s a letter from a fella I used to go to school with.”
“High school or college?” I’d ask him.
“College,” he’d say.
“What college?” I’d say.
Then he’d stall a wile and then he’d say:
“I didn’t go to the college myself, but my friend went there.”
“How did it happen you didn’t go?” Carey’d ask him.
“Well,” he’d say, “they wasn’t no colleges near where I lived.”
“Didn’t you live in Kansas City?” I’d say to him.
One time he’d say he did and another time he didn’t. One time he says he lived in Michigan.
“Where at?” says Carey.
“Near Detroit,” he says.
“Well,” I says, “Detroit’s near Ann Arbor and that’s where they got the university.”
“Yes,” says Ike, “they got it there now, but they didn’t have it there then.”
“I come pretty near goin’ to Syracuse,” I says, “only they wasn’t no railroads runnin’ through there in them days.”
“Where’d this friend o’ yours go to college?” says Carey.
“I forget now,” says
