“Get back to your position and play ball, Cooper,” said the captain, as calmly as he could. “We’ve got to stop this foolishness right here. They mustn’t make another run.”
Grant’s teeth were set and his under jaw looked grim and hard. He knew well enough that Cohen was especially dangerous at this stage of the game, for the nervy Hebrew was one of those rare batters who hit better in a pinch than at any other time, the necessity seeming always to prime him properly.
Trying Cohen out with a bender that went wide in hopes that in his eagerness he would be led to reach for it, Rodney delivered a ball. The next one was high and likewise wide, for Stone had seen Foxhall taking a dangerous lead off second and called for a pitch that would put him in easy position to throw. Nelson, awake to precisely what was transpiring between the battery men, made a leap for the sack before the ball reached Stone’s hands, and Ben lined it down with a wonderful short-arm throw, which saved time and yet was full of powder.
Only for the warning shouts of the wide-awake coachers, who had seemed to divine the move in advance, Foxhall might have been caught napping. As it was, he barely succeeded in sliding back to the sack, feet first, and the Wyndham umpire instantly spread his hands out, palm downward. Foxhall drew a breath of relief.
A moment later Baxter shouted:
“Got him in a hole, Cohen! Make him put ’em over now! Make him find the pan!”
Steady as a rock, Grant did put the next one over, and Cohen, “playing the game,” let it pass for a called strike.
“He can’t do it again!” cried Baxter. “Make ’em be good!”
Grant used a drop, starting the ball high so that it shot down past the batsman’s shoulders and across his chest. Even as the umpire called, “Strike two,” the Oakdale players shouted a warning to Stone. It was needless, for Ben had seen Foxhall speeding along the line in a desperate and seemingly ill-advised attempt to purloin third. Craftily Cohen fell back a step to one side, as if to give the catcher room to throw, but with the real purpose of bothering him as much as possible without bringing, by interference, a penalty upon the runner. Possibly this was the reason why Stone threw high, forcing Osgood to reach to the full length of his arms in order to get the sphere. Almost invariably the Oakdale catcher put the ball straight and low into the hands of the baseman, so that the latter could tag a sliding runner quickly and easily; and had he been able to do this now, Foxhall doubtless could not have slid safely under Osgood, which, however, was precisely what he did succeed in doing.
“Who said we couldn’t steal on old Stoney?” shouted Pelty from the coaching line back of third. “Great work, Foxy, old man. You put that one across on him.”