“Father is so set,” she murmured; “yet I’ve always been able to bring him round some way, and I must do it about this; for I just can’t stay away from the games. I guess I’m a real fan, all right, and I’ll be worse than ever with Kingsbridge winning from Bancroft, and—and Lefty pitching. He’s surely what they can call some pitcher. And he can fight—gracious!”
She shivered a bit at the recollection of the scene she had witnessed after the game was over. Again she seemed to behold those fighting men hammering at each other with their bare fists, savage, bloodstained, brutal. She shuddered at the remembered glare of their eyes, the wheezing of their panted breathing, and the crushing sound of their blows. From her parted lips came a little gasp, as once more on her ears seemed to fall the clear crack of Tom Locke’s fist smiting his foe full on the point of the jaw with such force that Hoover’s legs had given way beneath him like props of straw.
“He can pitch, and he can fight,” she whispered. “He looks clean and manly, too. I wonder what he’s really like. I suppose he must be coarse and vulgar. When father hears about that affair, he’ll be far more set against the game than ever, and he’s sure to hear, for the whole town must be talking of it now.”
While she made her toilet for tea, the clean-cut, determined face of the young pitcher seemed to haunt her. Vexed by this, she decided to put him resolutely out of her mind.
“I’m like a silly schoolgirl, seeking a hero to worship,” she laughed, blushing at her folly. “I’m old enough to know better. Such heroes always have feet of clay. Still, I’d like to think of him as well as I can—as a pitcher; and, to do so, it is wise that I should view him from afar, that his flaws may not be too apparent. I’ll take care about that.”
Then her thoughts turned to Benton King, and a little frown gathered upon her face. To-day, as they were driving homeward, and especially as they were saying good night at the door, there had been something in his manner and his words that he had never before unveiled to her. Hitherto they had been just good friends—he deferential, in a way—yet free and easy, as such friends might be, with no self-consciousness or constraint; but now, after this, something warned her that it would be changed, even though, as she believed, he had been neither deep nor sincere in what he had felt or said.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, still frowning; “for I like Bent, and he’s about the only young man in Kingsbridge I’d care to be really friendly with. I suppose it’s been so long since he’s had an opportunity to talk such nonsense to a girl that he just had to try it on some one to keep in practice. But I don’t like it, and I’ll have to stop it. Next time he tries it, I’ll chaff him till he quits. I’ll tell him I like Lefty.”
She could not have chosen a more certain method of preventing Benton King from quitting.