"But they'll come," declared Molly Sefton for the hundredth time. "If they don't"—she stamped her foot angrily—"if they don't come, why—why, we'll just go out there and play that Belden team ourselves." Whereat the portly Mr. Sefton and the gray-haired Mr. Hibbs winced perceptibly.
"I don't understand it," said the Scout Master of the Black Eagle Patrol, also for the hundredth time. "The train should have arrived long ago."
"Nonsense!" snapped Mr. Sefton, speaking as if it were a lesson he was learning by heart. "It's late, that's all. Nothing to worry about. Give them time."
Molly saw the man first. He was shouldering his way up the rows of seats from the ground toward them, and he was doing it with an officiousness that marked him as a person of importance. He wore a black suit, almost ministerial in cut, a stiff white shirt, and a black bow tie of the sort that is put on by tucking two stiff ends underneath the flaps of a turn-down collar.
"Gentlemen," he said, halting before the two Lakeville men and ignoring Miss Molly altogether, "where is your baseball team?"
Mr. Sefton held him eye to eye. "It's coming," he announced confidently.
"Are you the Belden coach?" Horace Hibbs asked mildly.
"No, gentlemen, I am not the coach. I am, you might say, the man behind the team. Throughout the season, I have been its supporter, its mainstay, its benefactor. Allow me to offer an illustration of what I mean. Do you see that flagstaff?"
"Yes."
"I contributed that. When Belden has won this game, I shall run up the pennant with my own hands, and I shall, at the request of my friends, say—ahem, a few words of congratulation to the team and the assembled crowd."