“Hanged if I know; but I know I won the toss. But who did call?”
“I don’t know; but I’m certain that I won the toss.”
A howl of laughter broke from the light-minded persons in the other room. But on our part we preserved a very religious gravity, I can assure you. The dismay that had seized the whole team was terrible to contemplate.
“Well, who saw us toss?” said their Captain confidently.
“Yes; who saw us toss?” said ours, with an equally full-toned conviction.
Yet, unhappily or happily, sure I know not which, neither side could produce a single witness.[C]
What was to be done? The crowd was growing highly impatient, and cries of “Play up!” assailed us as we stood and argued.
“I don’t think there’s anything in the rules that provides for both sides going in to bat,” drawled the General Nuisance; “therefore, suppose we send in a man, you send in a man; you have a bowler on at one end, we have one on at the other, and all field? That practically obviates the difficulty, doesn’t it? And it’ll be ever so much nicer for everybody.”
Though this solution was hailed by us as the height of ingenuity, and “nice” to the last degree, singularly enough Hickory were blind to its beauties. Therefore when our Captain said, “We’d better toss again, hadn’t we?” it struck George Trentham that this was a rather good idea.
This time, that there might be no mistake, both sides crowded round their irresponsible skippers. Hickory had a tendency to view the thing as the finest joke they’d ever heard, but Little Clumpton to a man wore a funereal gravity. Trentham produced a coin, and sent it spinning to the ceiling.