"That's so, papa," sighed Alice, "and I have dreadful forebodings when I think of the risk that they have undertaken."
"Nothing venture, nothing have, Alice, and it will be no disgrace if our nine are defeated by the Calumets. Unless they are very badly beaten indeed, and that is not improbable, to be sure, they will bring some new honors off the field."
The Judge's conservative and moderate view of the case was that of the average of Catalpa. To play the Calumets was in itself an honor.
Henry Jackson represented the most discouraging element in Catalpa public opinion. And when Ben Burton returned to town for a day's holiday, and became at once unusually familiar with Hank, Larry's face clouded and Alice Howell confidentially informed her friend Ida Boardman that she never could abide Ben Burton, and that now she knew he was a man who would consort with mean companions. Nothing could be lower, she thought, than the course that Henry Jackson had taken during the late contest between the Catalpas and the Galenas.
It was only by a lucky accident that the Calumets had been able to find a place in their later engagements for a championship series of three games with the Catalpas. The sudden sickness of several members of the Osceola club, engaged to play the Calumets, had made it necessary to cancel all the engagements of the former club for the season. The Osceolas had been overtaken by a contagious disease that had made sad havoc that summer, as many will remember, among strangers who visited the lower portion of the State, which had been under water from late in February until the beginning of May. But the ill-luck of the Osceola club was the means of opening a way for the Catalpas to play the Calumets; and that was felt to be something almost providential—at least, in the town of Catalpa.
IN A NEW FIELD.
"I wish so many of the Catalpa folks had not come in to see the game, to-day," said Larry Boyne, discontentedly, on the morning of the first of the championship series of games in Chicago, late in the following October. "It is bad enough to feel like a cat in a strange garret as I do here, without the feeling added of being watched by our friends from home, who will be so awfully cut up if we do not win."