But Joe had also won another victory that he prized above all his baseball triumphs. He had met and fallen in love with Mabel Varley, a charming girl whom he had met under romantic circumstances near her home at Goldsboro, North Carolina. The course of true love did not run altogether smoothly in his case more than in others, but all attempts to part them had been triumphantly overcome and at the close of the previous season on the diamond, Joe and Mabel had been married. Joe esteemed himself the happiest and luckiest of men.
Joe had as his closest friend, Jim Barclay, a Princeton graduate who had entered the ranks of organized baseball and joined the Giants as a “rookie.” Joe had taken to him at once and they were speedily on the best of terms. Jim had a great deal of pitching ability, and under the careful tutelage of Joe he had blossomed out into a regular member of the pitching staff. At the present time he stood only second to Joe himself as a twirler, and bade fair to become one of the great stars of the game.
Jim had met Joe’s sister Clara when the latter had come on to see her brother pitch in one of the World Series games and had lost his heart at once. She, for her part, had at once conceived a marked admiration for the stalwart, handsome friend of her brother, and this had soon ripened into a deeper feeling. So that when Jim the year before had asked her the momentous question he had got the answer he craved, and their marriage was to take place as soon as the playing season was over.
Now to return to the two chums as they stood beside the pile of lumber that a few minutes before had so nearly caused the death of one of them.
“You see then, Jim, that my hunch was right and that what I said to you a little while ago wasn’t imagination,” said Joe.
“Some one is out to do you, for a fact,” assented Jim soberly. “And all I ask is that I may get my hands on him for five minutes. Just five little minutes! I’d make him wish he’d never been born!”
“That fellow you were chasing must have been the one who did it,” ruminated Joe. “Did you get a good glimpse of him? Had you ever seen him before?”
“Not that I know of,” replied Jim. “It certainly wasn’t either Hupft or McCarney, or I should have recognized him at a glance. But that doesn’t say that he mightn’t have been a tool of theirs. At any rate, you can be sure that he was the man that actually pushed over that pile of boards. His very running was a confession of guilt. And, by the way he ran, I shouldn’t wonder if he were a ball player himself. I’m not so slow myself, but he almost held his own. What a bit of bad luck it was that that trolley came along just at that minute.”
“What did he look like?” asked Joe. “Was there anything you could identify him by if you should happen to meet him again?”
“Well,” said Jim, cudgeling his memory, “I could see that his hair was light and that his ears stuck out more than most men’s. But I suppose there are ten thousand men in New York that would answer that description. He didn’t look like a workman and he didn’t have overalls on.”