"Bonfire," beamed Bunny happily, slapping the hero of the play on his back, after the Lakeville team had come in for the last of the ninth inning, "that was the most wonderful catch I ever saw. Honest, it was. I didn't know you had it in you. Why didn't you try for the team this spring?"
Bonfire stared at him quizzically. "Too big a coward, maybe," he said. "I was such a dub in track events and football and basketball and in baseball, too—last fall, I mean—that I didn't want to run the risk of being jeered and laughed at any more. Next season—" He allowed the sentence to remain unfinished, but his quick smile was more a promise than any words could have been.
With Belden leading by one run, and the game almost over, Lakeville began the ninth inning with a do-or-die energy. Roundy, up first, singled cleanly. Ordinarily, that hit would have stirred the team into ecstasies; now it called forth only a few half-hearted cheers. For Roundy was the last regular player on the batting list. After him, as Specs put it tersely, came nothing. "Nothing", in this case, meant the four substitutes.
Nap fouled out to the catcher. S. S. fanned; he always fanned, it seemed; if he had done anything else, the others would have thought it the end of the world. This brought Bonfire to bat, which is only another way of saying that the game was apparently lost; for every player on the Lakeville bench recalled his ludicrous attempts to connect with the ball when they had tested him at Molly's picnic.
But Bonfire was undismayed. Accidents might happen. Hadn't he knocked a home run that first day of school? And hadn't he studied batting as assiduously as he had studied fielding through the long season?
He knew how to grip his bat, six or eight inches from the knob, and how to take a choppy swing with his wrists, body and arms, stepping forward and sidewise to meet the ball. His older brother, who was something of a celebrity in college baseball, had drilled him in these technical points. During almost the whole of the Christmas holidays, when Bonfire had visited him, the two had repaired to the baseball cage of the college gymnasium; big brother pitching and explaining, little brother batting and—more and more frequently as they progressed—hitting. Later in the spring, two other loyal friends, sworn to secrecy, had thrown and thrown to him in the seclusion of the Cree backyard. At the outset, as in the fielding stunt, he had been chagrined over his failures. Little Jimmy White had fanned him; Molly Sefton had fanned him. But the time came when neither could fool him, when his bat lashed hard and true against their best offerings.
It was with these memories in mind that Bonfire stood facing the Belden pitcher. In the earlier innings, he had flied out once, walked twice, and missed a twisting third strike on his other trip to the plate. Bonner had him tabbed as a weakling with the bat; even his own team mates did not expect him to hit. Bonfire's lips set in a straight, firm line.
He waited unmoving as the first ball sped past. It was the usual coaxer, a bit wide of the plate. But when the pitcher wound up again, Bonfire braced himself, breathing quickly. The straight, fast ball was due.
"I'm going to hit it," he told himself in a matter-of-fact way. "I'm going to hit it—hard."
The pitch began. From the coil of whirling arms, the ball leaped toward the plate. At the same instant, Bonfire tensed the muscles of his arms and began the swing of his body. Ball and bat met exactly above the center of the plate.