"I may be a bit, before the game," Dick confessed, candidly.
"But after the game starts?"
"Once the game opens, I shall forget that there's any such fellow as Prescott, sir. I shall be just a part of Gridley, with nothing individual about me."
"Good! I like to hear you talk that way," laughed Mr. Luce. "I hope you'll be able to keep up to it when you go to the diamond. Once the game opens, don't let yourself have a single careless moment. Any single point we can get away from Gardiner will have to be done by just watching for it. You saw them play last year?"
"I did," Prescott nodded. "Gridley won, four to three, and until the last half of the last inning we had only one run. I thought nothing could save us that day."
"Nothing did," replied the coach, "except the hard and fast can't-lose tradition of Gridley."
"We're not going to lose this time, either," Dick declared. "I know that I'm going to strike out a string in every inning. If I go stale, you have Darrin to fall back on, and he's as baffling a pitcher as I can hope to be. And Ripley is a wonder."
"He would be," nodded Mr. Luce, sadly, "if he were a better base runner at the same time."
It seemed as though nothing else could be talked of in Gridley but the opening game. Just because it was the starter of the season the local military band, reinforced to thirty-five pieces, was to be on hand to give swing and life to the affair.
"Are you going, Laura?" Dick asked, when he met Miss Bentley.