What had gone before was as nothing to the roar which rose from the cubs when they saw three grinning players jog, one after the other, across the plate. As one man, they turned on Lefty and poured out the vials of their wrath in vivid, soul-stirring, mouth-filling phrases, which left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Interspersed with these gusts of abuse were yells of: “Take him out! Take—him—out!” which were quite unnecessary. Lefty realized that he was done for, and did not even glance toward Ogan as he walked toward the bench. He heard the latter’s angry voice, however, yelling after him: “Get off the field, you boneheaded quitter!” And that seemed to hurt more than anything else.
He wasn’t a quitter. He had done his best, and it was not his fault that he had failed. No doubt he should never have gone out there at all, but how many of those others, face to face with the alternative he had met that morning, would have decided differently?
Head down and hands tightly clenched, he made his way toward the bench, not even looking up as he passed Bert Elgin, racing out to take his place. He flung himself down on the turf and lay there, chin propped in his cupped hands, eyes staring blindly out across the diamond.
More than once the regulars glanced curiously in his direction, but no one spoke. A little later, when the Yannigans trooped in, having succeeded in holding down the score, Lefty fully expected a storm of bitter reproaches to be hurled at him; but nothing came. The fellows took their places on the bench or the coaching lines without so much as a glance toward the chap lying there on the grass. For all the attention they paid to him, he might have been a log of wood.
As inning after inning passed amid that same studied silence and marked avoidance, Lefty felt that he would rather have endured sneers, blows, anything else. His head still throbbed and he was feeling wretched, mentally and physically. He was a fool not to have left the field at once; but, being there, his innate stubbornness kept him to the end.
Presently Jack Stillman came up and chatted casually for a minute or two, but Lefty was so mortally averse to pity that his replies were short almost to ungraciousness; and the reporter walked away, a puzzled look on his face.
By dint of fast, strenuous playing on the part of the cubs, assisted by the easy-going ways of their opponents, the regulars were kept from further scoring, while the Yannigans made two tallies before the end of the last inning. But for Locke’s errors they would have won the game. The realization did not tend toward soothing their ruffled spirits.
As the teams mingled on the field at the end of the fifth inning, the one crowd grinning and joshing, the other responding with defensive sarcasm, Lefty caught an angry glare from more than one pair of eyes among the disappointed youngsters.