“A puff isn’t quite the word. I wish you could have seen some of the rot Temple, of the Blade, doped out. He wanted my opinion on it; said he was a bit new to this, you know. I smoothed down the story a little, but I’m dead sure a lot more will rant as bad, or worse. Most of ’em seem to think because the regulars had a landslide it was due to Elgin’s pitching. They don’t figure out that Redmond’s bum work had anything to do with it.”
“What’s the odds?” Lefty laughed. “You did the same thing last year, didn’t you?”
“Not quite. I knew something about baseball to start with, and Johnny Hargreaves tipped me off to a whole lot more.”
“Still, Elgin really did do pretty well,” Locke remarked slowly. “Anybody must concede that much.”
“No better than he has half a dozen times before,” the reporter retorted. “That’s all I said in my story, but when I found the way the rest were piling it on, I had to stick in another paragraph. Otherwise I’d be getting a wire from the chief to wake up and take notice.”
“After all, I don’t believe it amounts to a terrible lot,” Lefty said carelessly. “You can’t fool Brennan, and his opinion is really the only one that counts.”
Nevertheless, as he joined the squad a little later for the morning jog out to the grounds, Lefty could not help feeling a twinge of regretful envy. If he had only been allowed to go on the slab for the cubs the day before, he had a notion that Elgin’s performance would not have seemed quite so brilliant. Those laudatory newspaper notices might have had someone else as the object of their praise, and, though he knew how little such plaudits really counted, Lefty was a very human sort of fellow, after all.
According to his promise, Al Ogan put the southpaw in the box that afternoon, and Locke pitched for six innings to such purpose that the game resulted in a tie in spite of the fact that the regulars were in as good a form as ever, and seemed to work a little harder than usual.
From that time on, Locke’s companions began to thaw. Once they realized that Lefty’s first disastrous exhibition had not been a sample of his usual form, they endeavored to make up for past unpleasantness.
Perhaps their new friendliness was hastened by the newspaper prominence of Bert Elgin. Few men can view unmoved the sudden elevation to fame of a comrade, especially when they feel that this elevation has not been especially merited. Newspapers began to drift in from all the big cities, in which Elgin was heralded as “Brennan’s New Find,” “A Second Matty,” “By Far the Most Promising Recruit of the Season,” and so on.