“My name is Bert Elgin,” the younger man returned in respectful tones. “I’ll be very glad indeed to come and see you some evening before you leave town.”
“Yes, yes,” the clergyman agreed, with impatience. “Janet, my dear, I think we had better go in. I am feeling—a little faint.”
Without a word Elgin took one arm solicitously. The girl sprang to the other side of her father, and in silence they helped him up the steps of the veranda. A big, broad-shouldered man of middle age answered the ring, and, amid the bustle of greeting which followed, Elgin tactfully departed.
At the gate he paused, glancing back at the closed door, the remembrance of a pair of wonderful violet eyes and a perfect mouth curved in a rather absent smile still vividly in his mind.
“A queen!” he said aloud. “Molly Wendell can’t touch her for a minute.” Slowly he moved on a few steps; then he chuckled: “That was a cute trick, all right, and pulled off to perfection. I ought to hand that old bag of bones a square feed for giving me the chance. Will I call to-morrow night and let the old geezer thank me? Will I? Ask me!”
CHAPTER XV
THE REASON WHY
Out on the field next morning Lefty Locke threw himself heart and soul into his work. He was conscious that Manager Brennan was watching his efforts with the eyes of a lynx, and though that made him slightly nervous at first, it presently came to have the opposite effect, stimulating him to greater endeavor.
“Kid ain’t doing bad to-day,” drawled Buck Fargo critically to Jack Stillman, sitting beside him on the bench. “He certainly was rotten in the game, though. I wonder what ailed him? Don’t seem like one glass of beer would knock a fellow out like that.”
“Depends on what’s in it besides the beer,” the newspaper man replied impulsively.