“I tell you—I didn’t—mean—” he stammered, and then was silent.
“You’re a liar!” was the retort. “Ain’t you going to put your fists up, or must I make you?”
There was no reply, and, with a swift forward motion, Fargo lunged and brought his open palm against Elgin’s cheek with stinging force. The youngster staggered back, straightened, and stood there, head hanging, the picture of terror.
For a moment Fargo stared in silence at the marks his fingers had left on the now crimson cheek. Then he burst into a laugh so full of scorn and contempt that the other winced.
“A quitter!” the big backstop sneered. “A rotten quitter, that’s what you are! You haven’t got an ounce of grit in your whole hulking carcass. I thought there was something queer about your being such a wonder with your fists. If you had any nerve you could have knocked me endwise—but you haven’t. You’re yellow straight through. I let you hit me with the ball a-purpose, so’s I could see what you were made of. I’ve found out. Your glove’s over in the stand, where I fired it.”
Without another word, he turned and strode toward the gate, leaving Elgin standing as if rooted to the ground. Bert’s face turned from red to white, from white to deep, purpling crimson. He gnawed his lips until the blood came, and his eyes were full of bitter shame at the humiliating discovery that he had been caught in the backstop’s trap to test his nerve.
CHAPTER XXII
LEFTY’S CHANCE COMES
Al Ogan, the promising cub first baseman and captain of the Yannigans, was not a bad fellow at heart. He had been as disgusted as any of his companions at Locke’s apparently inexcusable behavior which had lost them the first game with the regulars, and had joined heart and soul in the cold ignoring of the southpaw twirler from that time forth. But at the end of three or four days, during which he had watched Lefty’s work closely, he began to wonder whether he was right or not.
“Maybe he was sick or something that day,” he thought to himself late one morning, as he stood watching Lefty pitching to Buck Fargo. “He hasn’t been the same chap since. He’s certainly got smoke, and he can put the stuff on the pill when he tries.”