“Say, Jack! if those fellows would only stay over a few days it would give us a chance to get up a baseball match against the Longley bunch.”
“So it would! We’d have our six fellows here and Dan, Walt and Ned. I don’t suppose Fatty Hendry would care to play. He never was much at baseball.”
“He could be one of the umpires. We’d probably want two—one from each side. That is, unless we could get some outsider.”
“It would be better to have an outsider, Gif. They wouldn’t be satisfied with our man’s decisions and probably we wouldn’t be satisfied with the decisions from their side.”
“Well, anyway, we’ll have to go down to Beldane and meet them. Then we can talk the matter over. Maybe, after all, Longley won’t give us a match. You know how Tommy Flanders felt about it.”
“Yes. But I think Ted Maxwell has more influence with the crowd than Tommy Flanders.”
As before, Jack had a letter from Ruth. The girls were talking of returning to New York and then the crowd were to visit May Powell. Ruth wrote that her father was still somewhat sick and greatly worried over his business affairs and over the loss of his book of formulas.
“That certainly is a mystery, Jack,” said Gif, when the young major mentioned the matter to him. “I don’t see why he doesn’t get some first-class detectives on the trail of those thieves.”
“I suppose he has somebody on the case,” answered Jack. “It’s pretty hard, though, to do anything if you haven’t got some sort of clue to work on.”