This Mr. Birdseye, be it said, was hardly less widely known than a certain former governor of the state, who as the leading citizen of Anneburg took a distinguished part in all civic and communal movements. Yet the man was not wealthy or eloquent; neither was he learned in the law nor gifted with the pen. His gainful pursuit was that of being a commercial traveller. His business of livelihood was to sell Good Old Mother Menifee’s Infallible Chill Cure through nine adjacent counties of the midcontinental malaria zone. But his principal profession was [371] the profession of baseball. In his mind G. O. P. stood for Grand Occidental Pastime, and he always thought of it as spelled with capital letters. He knew the national game as a mother knows the colour of her first-born’s eyes. He yearned for it in the off-season interim as a drunkard for his bottle. Offhand he could tell you the exact weight of the bat wielded by Ed Delehanty in 1899 when Ed hit 408; or what Big Dan Brouthers’ average was in Big Dan’s best year; or where Cap. Anson was born and how he first broke into fast company, and all the lesser circumstances connected with that paramount event. His was the signature that headed the subscription list which each February secured for Anneburg a membership franchise in a Class C League, and he the sincerest mourner when the circuit uniformly blew up with a low, penniless thud toward the Fourth of July.
He glanced at the headlines of the various metropolitan papers for which he subscribed; that was because, as a patriotic and public-spirited American, he deemed it to be his duty to keep abreast of war, crimes, markets, politics, and the other live issues of the day; but what he really read was the sporting department, reading it from the vignette of its chief editor, displayed in the upper left-hand corner, to the sweepings of minute diamond dust accumulated in the lower right-hand corner.
In short, J. Henry Birdseye was a fan in all that the word implies. In a grist mill, now, a [372] fan means something which winnows out the chaff from the grain. In the Orient a fan means a plane-surface of coloured paper, bearing a picture of a snow-capped mountain, and having also a bamboo handle, and a tendency to come unravelled round the edges. But when anywhere in these United States you speak of a fan, be you a Harlem cliff-swallow or a Bangtown jay, you mean such a one as J. Henry Birdseye. You know him, I know him, everybody knows him. So much being conceded, we get down to our knitting.
Springtime had come: ’twas early April. The robin, which is a harbinger in the North and a potpie in the South, had winged his way from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Central Park, New York, and, stepping stiffly on his frost-bitten toes, was regretting he had been in such a hurry about it. Palm Beach being through and Newport not yet begun, the idle rich were disconsolately reflecting that for them there was nowhere to go except home. That Anglophobiac of the feathered kingdom, the English snipe, bid a reluctant farewell to the Old Southern angleworms whose hospitality he had enjoyed all winter, and headed for Upper Quebec, intent now on family duties. And one morning Mr. Birdseye picked up the Anneburg Press Intelligencer, and read that on their homebound journey from the spring training camp the Moguls, league champions four times hand-running and World’s Champions every once in a [373] while, were by special arrangement to stop off for half a day in Anneburg and play an exhibition game with the Anneburg team of the K-A-T League.
Nor was it the second-string outfit of the Moguls that would come. That band of callow and diffident rookies would travel north over another route, its members earning their keep by playing match games as they went. No, Anneburg, favoured among the haunts of men, was to be honoured with the actual presence of the regulars, peerlessly captained by that short and wily premier of all baseball premiers, so young in years yet so old in wisdom, Swifty Megrue; and bearing with him in its train such deathless fixtures of the Temple of Fame as Long Leaf Pinderson, the Greatest Living Pitcher, he who, though barely out of his teens, already had made spitball a cherished household word in every American home; Magnus, that noble Indian, catcher by trade, a red chieftain in his own right; Gigs McGuire, mightiest among keystone bagsmen and worshipped the hemisphere over as the most eminent and at the same time the most cultured umpire-baiter a dazzled planet ever beheld; Flying Jenny Schuster, batsman extraordinary, likewise base-stealer without a peer; Albino Magoon, the Circassian Beauty of the outfield, especially to be loved and revered because a product of the Sunny Southland; Sauer and Krautman, better known as the Dutch Lunch [374] battery; little Lew Hull, who could play any position between sungarden and homeplate; Salmon, a veritable walloping window-blind with the stick; Jordan, who pitched on occasion, employing a gifted southpaw exclusively therefor; Rube Gracey; Streaky Flynn, always there with the old noodle and fast enough on his feet to be sure of a fixed assignment on almost any other team, but carried in this unparalleled aggregation of stars as a utility player; Andrew Jackson Harkness; Canuck LaFarge, and others yet besides. These mastodons among men would flash across the palpitant Anneburg horizon like a troupe of companion comets, would tarry just long enough to mop up the porous soil of Bragg County with the best defensive the K-A-T had to offer, and then at eventide would resume their journey to where, on the vast home grounds, new glories and fresh triumphs awaited them.
No such honour had ever come to Anneburg before; and as Mr. Birdseye, with quickened pulse, read and then reread the delectable tidings, forgetting all else of lesser import which the Press Intelligencer might contain, a splendid inspiration sprang full-grown into his brain, and in that moment he resolved that her, Anneburg’s, honour should be his, J. Henry Birdseye’s, opportunity. Opportunity, despite a current impression, does not knock once at every man’s door. Belief in the proverb to that effect has spelled many a man’s undoing. He [375] has besat him indoors awaiting the sound of her knuckles upon the panels when he should have been ranging afield with his eye peeled. As a seasoned travelling man Mr. Birdseye knew opportunity for what she is—a coy bird and hard to find—and knew that to get her you must go gunning for her. But he figured he had the proper ammunition in stock to bring down the quarry this time—the suitable salt to put on her tail. Of that also he felt most certain-sure.
The resolution took definite form and hardened. Details, ways and means, probable contingencies and possible emergencies—all these had been mapped and platted upon the blueprints of the thinker’s mind before he laid aside the paper. To but one man—and he only under the pledge of a secrecy almost Masonic in its power to bind—did Mr. Birdseye confide the completed plan of his campaign. That man was a neighbour of the Birdseyes, a Mr. Fluellen, more commonly known among friends as Pink Egg Fluellen. The gentleman did not owe his rather startling titular adornment to any idiosyncrasy of complexion or of physical aspect. He went through life an animate sacrifice to a mother’s pride. Because in her veins coursed the blood of two old South Carolina families, the Pinckneys and the Eggners, the misguided woman had seen fit to have the child christened Pinckney Eggner. Under the very lip of the baptismal font the nickname then was [376] born, and through all the days of his fleshy embodiment it walked with him. As a boy, boy-like, he had fought against it; as a man, chastened by the experience of maturity, he had ceased to rebel. Now, as the head of a family, he heard it without flinching.
On his way downtown after breakfast, Mr. Birdseye met Mr. Fluellen coming out of his gate bound in the same direction. As they walked along together Mr. Birdseye told Mr. Fluellen all, first, though, exacting from him a promise which really was in the nature of a solemn oath.
“You see, Pink Egg,” amplified Mr. Birdseye when the glittering main fact of his ambition had been revealed, “it’ll be like this: The Moguls get in here over the O. & Y. V. at twelve-forty-five that day. Coming from the West, that means they hit Barstow Junction at eleven-twenty and lay over there nine minutes for the northbound connection. Well, I’m making Delhi the day before—seeing my trade there. I drive over to the junction that evening from Delhi—it’s only nine miles by buggy—stay all night at the hotel, and when the train with the team gets in next morning, who climbs aboard her? Nobody but just little old me.”
“But won’t there be a delegation from here waiting at Barstow to meet ’em and ride in with ’em?”