“Hurrah!” shouted the chorus, at an extra toss, and “hurrah,” echoed Creepy, silently to be sure, but with none the less gusto for all that.
“Oh how I should like to try! I wonder when they’ll ask me;” and suddenly the thought that no one noticed him, which had been such a refuge at first, rushed on him with a very disagreeable suggestion and brought the old “all but me” nearer to his lips than it had been for months. But just then he saw that they were noticing him; the game was halting and more than one group were putting their heads together and glancing towards his corner with whispers that must have something to do with him.
“You ought to ask him to play,” said Tom, whose feeling of responsibility in the matter had made him decidedly uncomfortable all the time—only, as he had declared at first, he really didn’t know what to do.
“Humph,” said Carter, who, still smarting under his own humiliation, felt that it would be a relief to put somebody else in his place, “ask him to play! A bright idea that would be. What’s a fellow like him going to do?”
The words floated over to Creepy’s ears, though they were not really intended to do so, and sent the blood tingling to his fingers’ ends, and the thought of the doctor seemed as far off as if a whole world lay between them.
The boys laughed and the game began again, but a feeling like ice was gathering around Creepy’s heart. He was not to play! They would not ask him! “Why not you?” Perhaps he did not hear, perhaps he had made a mistake. Oh, where was the doctor? Why had he ever come here at all?
“I say, you ought to do it,” began Tom again, uneasily; “the professor said he was to have a good time out of it somehow.”
“Suppose you mind your own business,” said Carter; but it seemed to Davis, who felt himself “just on the brink” with the professor about the almanac, that he might lay an anchor to windward, and he made his way across to where Creepy stood.
“Hallo, can you pitch a ball?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I never tried,” said Creepy, forcing the words from between his lips.