As I say, we have a good team, and I think it should be a winning one if our manager is on the square and wants it to win. For some reason I do not trust the man.
At our first meeting I was seized by a powerful instinctive feeling of dislike and distrust. He is cold as a fish and bloodless as a stone, with a voice as flat and monotonous as the Desert of Sahara, and his frosty, unfeeling eye is not the eye of an honest man.
He does not belong in Kingsbridge, but has been hired, like the players on the team, and I should say that he is a person who stands ready to sell himself at any time for a price.
If it should happen that, near the close of the season, Kingsbridge stands between Bancroft and championship honors, Bancroft will cop the pennant easily enough by dickering on the “q. t.” with Mr. Robert Hutchinson—or I’m away off my trolley.
It was characteristic of the man reading the letter that he did not show his rage by flushing. His nose, however, became a livid, sickly white, and his thin lips were pressed somewhat more closely together, causing his mouth to resemble a straight, colorless scar. His face was that of a most dangerous man who would strike at an enemy’s back in the dark.
There were other paragraphs that Hutchinson read without skipping a line:
Oh, by the way, old fellow, I have met the most charming girl it has ever been my good luck to run across. I’m not going to try to describe her, because I simply lack command of language to do so, and by this confession alone you can see that she has me going some.
Her name is Janet Harting, and she is the daughter of a hard-shell parson whose pet aversion is baseball—a man who, according to report, believes all baseball players must be either children, fools, or ruffians.
Janet, however, has attended boarding school, and she’s a thoroughbred fan, though her father raises such a rumpus about it that she doesn’t get out to many games.
Benton King, son of the man who has metamorphosed Kingsbridge from a four-corners settlement into a hustling, rip-roaring young city-to-be, is mightily interested in Miss Janet. Judging by appearances, she is not exactly averse to his attentions, which, considering his prospects and the fact that he seems to have anything around here in the eligible-young-man line left at the post, is no source for wonderment.