“Very likely. Well, it’ll be some fun, anyhow. I understand their pitcher has a reputation for rough-and-ready baseball. I’ll be hanged, old man, if I wouldn’t be just as well pleased to see Elgin up against that sort of thing if I were you.”
“I’ll take a chance,” Lefty laughed. “I’ve been up against some tough characters before, and perhaps even this Texas steer can’t put much over me.”
“That remains to be seen,” chuckled Stillman. “The old man’s heading this way with Ogan, and from the expression on his face I should say you’d been chosen for the goat.”
His surmise proved to be correct.
“You’ll start the game to-morrow, Locke,” the manager said abruptly, as he halted by Lefty’s chair. “I’m told this Schaeffer is a roughneck, so look out for squalls. No matter what he does, don’t let him badger you into anything. I’ll see to it that he’s kept within bounds, but them kind of ball players is so full of tricks you can’t catch ’em all. You and Ogan and Fargo better get together to-night and fix up your signals.”
After Lefty and the cub captain had departed to hunt up their backstop, Jim Brennan stood for a moment looking at Stillman out of the corner of his eye. The latter was one of the few reporters with the squad that year who knew baseball from the ground up, and the stories he sent home to his paper usually had the manager’s entire approval.
“You don’t seem much fretted about putting your cubs up against this young sagebrush fellow,” the newspaper man remarked presently.
Brennan’s eyes twinkled a bit.
“I ain’t,” he admitted. “Likely they’ll get the pants licked off ’em, but that’ll do ’em good.”