Dick Merriwell's Heroic Players; Or, How the Yale Nine Won the Championship

by Burt L. Standish

But he wanted more than one run out of this inning. He could see that the Harvard team showed signs of going up in the air. Briggs, nervous and flurried, came in to consult with Bowen, and, in the infield, the men were quarreling, and trying to show how all the trouble could have been avoided if only some one else had done something in a different way. The confidence that had made the crimson team so dangerous before the game was being dissipated; and, knowing that Bowen, as soon as he had a chance, would be able to pull his team together, Dick wanted to strike while the iron was hot, and make the lead as big as possible.

Harry Maxwell was the next batter, and his orders were simply to tire Briggs out.

“Foul off as many balls as you can,” Dick told him. “I don’t want you to make a hit—at least, I don’t care whether you do or not. Just tire him out.”

Harry obeyed his orders to the letter, and Briggs, furious, and getting more nervous every minute, had to pitch nearly thirty balls before Bowen, by a wonderful sprint, finally managed to get under one of those towering fouls, right in front of the Yale bench, and hold it as it came down. And then, making use even of that chance, Jackson had time, after the catch had been made, to sprint to third base, so that Harry was credited with a sacrifice.

Bill Brady, the next batter, having been moved up, had orders to hit. Briggs, tired out after his struggle with Maxwell, hot and thirsty, lost his control for the moment, and Bill’s smashing drive bounded out from the left-field fence, to the confusion of the Harvard outfielder, who hadn’t, as Dick had made the Yale players do, spent any time in studying the peculiar angles and rebounds of that new concrete wall. Jackson scored easily, and Brady himself reached third, whence it was an easy matter for him to score while Steve Carter was being thrown out at first base. That made three runs, and Dick Merriwell was well satisfied with the harvest. Horton was an easy out, and the inning was over, but it had been a mighty fruitful one, and Dick felt that there was no reason, with such a lead, why Yale should not win.

But, as the players started to take the field, he warned them against being overconfident.

“Briggs will be all right after a five-minute rest,” he told them. “And we won’t catch them asleep that way again. There was a whole lot of luck in the way we got those three runs, and they’ll be watching us like cats for the rest of the game. Anything more we get, we’ll have to earn—be sure of that. But that won’t matter—if they can’t do any scoring. You’ve got enough runs to win this game right now—see that they don’t creep up on us and tie the score.”

There isn’t any record of what Bowen said to his team after that disastrous first inning, but it had the effect he wanted. The Harvard team seemed to have been turned into a machine. Every trick Yale tried was met and defeated, and Briggs, rallying, pitched like the master of the game that he really was. But Jim Phillips, too, was at his best. Tired he might be, and sore, but there was nothing in his pitching to let the Harvard players know it. He wasted none of his remaining strength as the game went on, but there were few men on the Harvard team who studied him as Reid did, and they kept on biting at wide curves that were meant to fool them with a break that came after they had thought it impossible for a ball to desert its straight course.

Reid outguessed him in the fourth inning, and got a base on balls, but there were two out at the time, and it made no difference. And Bowen himself, a batter who could at times hit any sort of a ball, even if a Mathewson had pitched it, got a long two-bagger in the sixth frame, when no one was out. But he was held at second, a brilliant catch by Bill Brady of a twisting foul and hard work by Jim himself disposing of the next three batters.

More and more, as the game went on, the crowd was forced to think that its result had been decided in that one tumultuous first inning, when Yale strategy and Yale pluck—though the Harvard people called it the proverbial Yale luck—had produced three runs. But the Harvard team kept on fighting, never willing to admit itself beaten. And the Yale men on the field, like Dick Merriwell, watching every move from the bench, knew that Yale could not claim the championship until the last Harvard man had been put out. It was a glorious struggle—one worth coming hundreds of miles to see, as many had done.