“I’m glad you came with Walter,” Ned was saying. “We’re in great need of a new pitcher. ‘Red’ Chandler finished his work here this spring and has gone up to Harvard. He’ll make the college nine first thing, you see if he doesn’t. He’s a born ball-player and he had the finest assortment of curves that the Tait School ever saw. He pitched a one-hit game against the Yale freshman team in June. Never made a hit, never got a ball outside the diamond until the ninth inning, and that was a scratch. The third-baseman of the freshman team let the ball hit his bat. I don’t believe he ever struck at it at all. If you can come anywhere near ‘Red’ you can own the whole school.”
Dan listened as Ned rattled on in his noisy boyish way, but he seldom replied except to certain direct questions.
“Can you pitch a drop?” Ned asked.
“Moulton said I could.”
“Good. He ought to know. Red had a ‘jump’ that was simply fierce. We always saved it for the third strike. And the beauty of it all was that I did not have to signal for it, so the other fellows never caught on. No signal just meant the ‘jump.’ You see, I had caught Red two years and we became almost like a machine.”
“The boys”—Dan started to say fellows but corrected himself—“must be sorry to lose him.”
“They are. Last summer when we shut up shop we all felt as if we had lost our best friend when Red left us. He certainly was a wonder! But if you can measure up to him or come anywhere near, you’ll wear diamonds here till you graduate—and forever after, for that matter.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Why—you’ll be all right. Sometimes you know a fellow gets a name for doing wonders in the place he comes from, but he finds out after he has been here a spell that—well, that the conditions aren’t just exactly the same. See, don’t you?”