The Boy Scouts of Lakeville High

by Leslie W. Quirk

"No use to pass him," he agreed. "That Belden captain, Bonner, who is up next, is nearly as dangerous. No, the play is to make Hogan hit to save fielder." Aloud he called, "Get him, Bunny!"

Hogan watched disdainfully as the second pitch zipped past, wide of the plate. You couldn't fool that fellow. But the third, waist-high, straight over, was exactly to his liking. With a hunch of his powerful shoulders, he swung his mighty bludgeon of a bat hard against the ball.

It was a fly to left field, as long as the one that had baffled Prissler a moment before, but much higher. At the crack of the bat, Bonfire wheeled abruptly and began to run, picking a little tuft of grass, yards and yards away, as the target toward which the ball was speeding.

Head down, arms chugging, he ran as he had never run before. Even so, his hope of smothering the fly seemed utterly forlorn. In the first place, he was not a great sprinter; he probably could not reach it in time. But granting that his legs carried him over the ground fast enough, he had not gauged the course of the ball with his eyes; he could never hope to turn at the last instant, and find the falling ball in his very path. The Belden fans jeered his amateurish efforts, and shouted encouragement to the circling Hogan.

As he lifted a foot to plump it down on the little tuft of grass, Bonfire jerked his head around and flung up his hands. Into them, as accurately as if he had been watching it from the first, dropped the ball. He had made the catch over his left shoulder, almost at his neck.

At first, the Belden fans were disgruntled. "Horseshoes!" yelled one in disgust; and, "You lucky fish!" wailed another. But, in the end, they applauded the wonderful play.

In a way, of course, as Bonfire readily admitted to himself, it was luck: the same type of luck that makes a pitcher fling up a gloved hand to shield his face from a screaming liner, only to have the ball hit his palm and stick there. But it was something more than mere luck in Bonfire's case; it was the result of a whole season of observation and experiment.

The secret of the catch was buried deep in the boy's peculiarly inquisitive and analytic mind.

Big-league fielders did not wait till the ball was high in the air before running to get under it. At the crack of the bat, they were off. In the few professional games Bonfire had seen, he decided these star fielders estimated the force of the drive from the sound of crashing wood and horsehide, and the direction from the first glimpse of the rising ball. It was a knack of determining the spot where the fly would land; a kind of baseball instinct that could be developed only by infinite patience and observation.

At the beginning of the Lakeville season, Bonfire set himself the stint of training his eyes and ears. Day after day, while the nine practiced or played games, he tested his own powers. Sometimes he sat on the bench, alert to hear and see; sometimes he wandered out toward the fielders. But always, when a fly was hit, his ear registered the crack of the flailing bat, and his eye followed the ascending ball. Then, abruptly, he turned away. It would fall on that spot, he guessed, picking a target in the outfield; or there; or there. At first, naturally, he was often yards and yards astray in his calculations; but as the season waned, with no lessening of his tense study, he came gradually to guessing closer and closer, till finally the accuracy of his snap decisions was almost uncanny.