“Don’t get me all excited,” begged Joe with a smile. Yet he could not help feeling elated.
There was a viciousness in the pitching of Sam when he toed the plate that showed how his feelings had been stirred. He was evidently going to show how much superior he was.
He did strike out two men, and then came Joe’s turn at the bat. Our hero thought he detected a gleam of anger in Sam’s eyes.
“He’d just as soon hit me with a ball as not,” thought Joe, “and if he does it will hurt some. And he may be trying to bluff me so that I won’t stand up to the plate. I’ll see what I can do to him.”
Consequently, instead of waiting for the ball to get to him Joe stepped up and out to meet it before the curve “broke.” He “walked right into it,” as the baseball term has it, and the result was that he whacked out a pretty two-bagger that brought his mates to their feet with yells. Sam bit his lips in anger, but he kept his temper by an effort and struck out the next man so that Joe’s effort resulted in nothing.
The game went on, and when Sam at bat faced Joe, our hero could not help feeling a trifle nervous. He had sized up Sam’s style of batting, however, and was prepared.
“I’m going to give him a slow ball with an in-shoot to it,” decided Joe. “He keeps back from the plate and this will make him get still farther back. I’m going to strike him out.”
And strike him out Joe did, though not until after Sam had hit one foul that was within a shade of being fair. But when on his next two strikes he fanned the wind, there was a look of wonder and gratification on the face of Darrell.
“I believe Joe is going to make good,” he said to Rankin.
“It sure looks so. What about it?”