With seven out of eight safely stowed away, they tackled the Cubs in their lair. Here they met with their stiffest resistance. Axander, pitching against Markwith, nosed through with one victory. The Giants took the next two and would probably have grabbed a third if it had not been stopped by rain at a time that the Giants were in the lead.
On that rainy day the Giants got a laugh out of the game even if they did not register a victory. Four innings had been played and the Giants were two runs to the good. The rain threatened to come down hard every minute, and the Chicagos were doing everything in their power to delay the game so that it might end before the necessary five innings had been played that would have permitted it to be called a game.
But the umpire was obdurate, and even when a drizzle set in kept the game going. Then a diversion was caused by the appearance of one of the Chicago substitutes, “Dummy Masterson,” so called because he was deaf and dumb, who emerged from under the grandstand in raincoat and rubber boots in which he pretended to be wading about in derision of the umpire who was at the plate.
A roar of laughter went up from the crowd and the umpire flushed angrily at this mockery of his decision to go ahead with the game. He wrathfully waved Masterson off the field.
“Dummy” went slowly, but as he did so he “talked” vehemently with his companions on the bench, who were doubled up with laughter at the opinion of the umpire he was expressing. From their association with him they had learned enough about the sign language to understand it readily, while Masterson felt safe, as far as the umpire himself was concerned.
What was Masterson’s consternation, however, when suddenly the umpire’s hands went up and his fingers also began to work.
“I’m a robber, am I?” his fingers said. “I’ve got mud in my eyes, have I? All my head is fit for is to hang a cap on, is it? That’ll cost you twenty-five, Masterson, and if you don’t get off the field in a hurry I’ll make it fifty.”
The discomfited “Dummy” wilted and vanished, and the laugh was with the umpire, who, as it happened, had a brother-in-law who was deaf and dumb and from whom he had learned the sign language.