All the while Bill sat in a darkened corner, for Lawson had insisted on this since his advent into the room, saying that darkness was good for weak eyes. And poor Bill fingered his pitching glove, wondering if he would ever get back into the box again. Cap was straightening a bent wire in his mask and Pete was re-winding some tape on a favorite bat that always opened at the split every time he used it. But he could not bring himself to throw it away.
“Mind now,” stipulated Lawson, as he and Whistle-Breeches took their leave, “you see that eye man to-morrow.”
And Bill promised.
They went to the oculist’s together, Cap and Bill, and the pitcher was put through a number of tests. He sat and looked at candles, while the medical man put a lens in front of the lights, and turned the glass sideways to make the single image develop into two. Then when Bill admitted that the two lights were not on the same level (as they should have been to one of normal vision) the oculist shook his head doubtfully.
Next he looked through the eye away into the back of Bill’s head, with a queerly constructed instrument, and reflected glaring lights into the lad’s orbs until he blinked in pain. Reading cards of different size type, taking a stick, and trying to impale a series of concentric circles, first with his left eye closed and then with the right one shut, ended the test.
“Well,” announced the oculist at length, “it’s not as bad as it might be. Your left eye is considerably out of focus, and I should say it was caused by some pressure on the optic nerve—possibly the result of that blow with the ball.”
“But what can be done about it?” demanded Bill with a note of despair in his voice.
“Well, nothing much. In time it may readjust itself, and again—it may not.”
“Do you mean that I’ll always be this way—not able to throw straight?” demanded the pitcher almost springing up from his chair.
“Easy now, old man,” cautioned Cap in a low voice.