“Do–do you know who he is?” Pem flashed the question upon the older of her two boy-knights.
“Well-ll! I guess so.” Stud’s joy in the recognition floundered a little. “He–he’s the fellow–one of the fellows–who boomed the aëroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when there was a ‘rattler–’”
“As if we’d have made a fuss, anyhow!” The girl’s eyes blazed, again a patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. “You said–you said that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a milestone–ah!” Her own voice was suddenly stony. “Have you–oh! have you made any headway since?”
“Humph! Yes. I’ve found out something about him.”
The patrol leader’s preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely nearer to the wharf, with its one “nickum” figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this moment it awkwardly “caught a crab” and almost suggestively lost an oar.
Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to say: “I’ll be there in time!” then bent his hungry nose to the paper again.
“What–what did you find out about him?” Pem’s interest was equally hungry–positively famishing. “His name–eh?”
“Ha–that’s the question! Over on Greylock the farmers’ sons call him Shooting Star’, alias ‘Starry’,” with a boyish laugh, “because when they were awf’ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute too, by gracious! he breezed along, an’ the captain, hearing he had played on a college team, roped him in ... an’–an’, what do you know, but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run over the left field fence! Bully!”
“But, surely, they know his–real–name!” Pem’s aloof absorption in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field fence.
“Maybe they do–and maybe they don’t! He refused it to the fans. And when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my cousin who’s pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just ‘throwing a tub to a whale’–something fishy about it, see?” Stud winked. “For ‘Starry’ an’ his father–who’s a queer fish, if ever there was one–had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in charge o’ the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them addressed to another name–only he couldn’t–wouldn’t–give it away.”