Bart Hodge leaped into the air with a yell of astonishment and joy.
It was the hit of Rattleton’s whole career in baseball. Clean over the most distant portion of centre-field fence sailed the ball, disappearing from view.
A second yell escaped Bart’s lips, and he began “throwing cartwheels,” while Merriwell, Browning, and Rattleton capered round the bases and came home.
The spectators seemed dazed.
No one, however, was more dazed than Carey Cameron. He did not move from the bench.
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE CLUB CONSERVATORY.
Their experience with the sporting element of Cartersville had been so unpleasant that Frank and his friends had no desire to remain longer in the town. Greatly to their surprise they were not molested in any way by the friends of Carey Cameron, who seemed to have received a knockout blow, and the Merries left the town by the first train for the East.
Their objective point was Ashport, where a gentleman by the name of Robert Ashley had offered a magnificent trophy to be contested for by all legitimate amateurs who wished to enter a cross-country running contest. It was not that Frank, or any of his team, intended to enter the contest that had influenced Merry to take in Ashport on his journey to the East, but he had heard much about the man who was promoting the event, and what he had heard had been favorable.
Ashley was an Englishman, and shortly after graduating from Oxford he had found himself, at the death of his father, left with but a small portion of the fortune he had been led to believe he should inherit. Quickly realizing that the income of this reduced fortune would not support him in the style he desired, he put aside family and caste prejudice against “trade” and formed an unfortunate business alliance with a shrewd rascal, who quickly succeeded by crooked methods in robbing him of what he had left, and then threw him over to face the world.