"I'm glad we don't," choked Hi. "There's no satisfaction being in a league in which the other teams are made up of rowdies."
"It is tough," mocked Ted. "Especially when the rowdies are the only fellows who know how to play ball."
Hi stalked away in moody, but dignified silence. Yet, though he could ignore the players and sympathizers of other nines, it was not so easy to get away from the grilling of his own schoolmates.
"Huh!" remarked one North boy. "You told us, Martin, that you'd prove to us the benefit of having a real captain for a nine. Why didn't you?"
"Martin, you're all wind," growled another keenly disappointed North. "You talked a lot about what you'd do with the nine—-and what have you done? Left us the boobies of the league. We're the winners of the leather medal."
"Why didn't you play yourself, then?" snarled Hi.
"I wish I had. But we Norths were fooled by the talk you gave us about how baseball really ought to be played and managed. You're the school's mascot, you are, Hi Martin. Not!"
In the meantime Dick Prescott was being surrounded by anxious
Central Grammar boys.
"Dick," said one of them, while others listened eagerly, "you beat the Norths. But you didn't give them any such drubbing as the Souths did to-day. Are they a better nine than ours?"
"No," Prescott answered promptly.