“Oh! Dash, dot—dash, dash, dash!”
Sidney laughed. “No! Here, you try me.”
At ten o’clock they performed the regular procedure of getting the time and then Tom said good night and walked home through the quiet streets, briskly because the evenings were still chill, thinking much of the way about that elusive out-curve!
The next day he searched through the pile of little paper-clad volumes of the Athletic Library which were a part of his stock at the store and was lucky enough to find “How to Pitch a Base-Ball.” In the interims of waiting on customers he studied the book. But it didn’t seem just what he wanted. He got a ball and followed the directions given for holding it, alternately frowning over the text and his fingers, and wished he might pitch it and see what would happen. After awhile he quietly stole down to the basement, switched on the lights, and let drive at the partition that hid the plumbing shop. If the ball curved he didn’t discern it. What he did discern was Jim Hobb’s black head stuck through the doorway in the partition and Jim’s incensed countenance.
“Hi! What in thunder are you doing, Tom?”
“I threw a baseball.”
“Well, you knocked a wrench off the shelf and nearly bust my hand open. You get out of here with your baseballs!”
Tom recovered the ball and returned upstairs disappointedly to find Mr. Wright fuming and fussing because Tom had left the counter and two small boys wanted to buy a catcher’s mitt.
But that evening, after depositing a dime in the firm’s treasury as the price of the handbook, Tom took “How to Pitch a Base-Ball” to supper with him, propped it against the sugar-bowl and, since the other boarders had gone and he had the dining-room to himself, studied it assiduously from soup to pie. So eager was he to practise the book’s teachings that he took a car out to Alameda Avenue, instead of walking, and haled Sidney at once to the vacant lot, exhibiting the volume on the way. Sidney was not greatly impressed with it.