'Certainly,' said Haywood. 'What do you play on your team?'
'Ketcher. Ever play any?'
'Never in my life,' said Haywood. 'I've never known any fellows except one or two of my cousins.'
'Jer like to learn? We're goin' to have a practice- game before the match. Wanter come along? I'll put yer in left-field, and yer won't be long ketchin' on.'
'I'd like it bully,' said Haywood. 'I've alway- wanted to play baseball.'
The ladies' maids of New York and the families of Western mine owners with social ambitions will remember well the sensation that was created by the report that the young multi-millionaire, Haywood Van Plushvelt, was playing ball with the village youths of Fishampton. It was conceded that the millennium of democracy had come. Reporters and photographers swarmed to the island. The papers printed half-page pictures of him as short-stop stopping a hot grounder. The Toadies' Magazine got out a Bat and Ball number that covered the subject historically, beginning with the vampire bat and ending with the Patriarchs' ball -- illustrated with interior views of the Van Plushvelt country seat. Ministers, educators and sociologists everywhere hailed the event as the tocsin call that proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man.
One afternoon I was reclining under the trees near the shore at Fishampton in the esteemed company of an eminent, bald-headed young sociologist. By way of note it may be inserted that all sociologists are more or less bald, and exactly thirty-two. Look 'em over.
The sociologist was citing the Van Plushvelt case as the most important 'uplift' symptom of a generation, and as an excuse for his own existence.
Immediately before us were the village baseball grounds. And now came the sportive youth of Fishampton and distributed themselves, shouting, about the diamond. 'There,' said the sociologist, pointing, 'there is young Van Plushvelt.'
I raised myself (so far a cosycophant with Mary Ann) and gazed.
Young Van Plushvelt sat upon the ground. He was dressed in a ragged red sweater, wrecked and weather- worn golf cap, run-over shoes, and trousers of the 'ser- viceable' brand. Dust clinging to the moisture induced by free exercise, darkened wide areas of his face.
'That is he,' repeated the sociologist. If he had said 'him' I could have been less vindictive.
On a bench, with an air, sat the young millionaire's chum.
He was dressed in a neat suit of dark blue serge, a neat white straw hat, neat low-cut tan shoes, linen of the well-known 'immaculate' trade mark, a neat, narrow four-in-hand tie, and carried a- slender, neat bamboo cane.
I laughed loudly and vulgarly.
'What you want to do,' said I to the sociologist, 'is to establish a reformatory for the Logical Vicious Circle. Or else I've got wheels. It looks to me as if things are running round and round in circles instead of getting anywhere.'
'What do you mean?' asked the man of progress.
'Why, look what he has done to 'Smoky,' I replied.
'You will always be a fool,' said my friend, the sociologist, getting up and walking away.
IT LOOKED like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama -- Bill Driscoll and myself -- when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, 'during a moment of temporary mental apparition'; but we didn't find that out till later.
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants Of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi- rural communities; therefore and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and maybe some lackadaisical blood- hounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget. So, it looked good.
We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respect- able and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser. The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.
About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There we stored provisions. One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy past old Dorset's house. The kid was in the street, throw- ing rocks at a kitten on the opposite fence.
'Hey, little boy!' says Bill, 'would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?'
The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.
'That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,' says Bill, climbing over the wheel.
That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the moun- tain.
Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. There was a burning behind the big rock at the entrance of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two buzzard tail- feathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me when I come up, and says:
'Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains?
