“Well, if he passes four men to-day it will help a lot,” said Tom with a laugh. “Why didn’t he stick to baseball, Jimmy?”
“Oh, he got married and had to earn money. So he went into the mill. He hasn’t played ball for a couple of years, I guess, but I don’t suppose he’s forgotten how.”
He hadn’t, and there wasn’t much to that game after four innings. Doyle may have lost some of his cunning through lack of practice, but he had sufficient skill left to keep high school guessing. In the second inning, and again in the fourth, high school got men on bases, and in the fourth tallied two runs, a lucky hit by Captain Madden sending in a couple of runners. But that was all the scoring high school was able to do. On the other hand, the mill team knocked Billy Younger out of the box in the third, piling up five tallies. Billy had an off day for once and was extremely unsteady. Chester Madden pulled him out and went to the mound himself. Chester got a sound drubbing and when the ninth inning was at last over the mill team had won by twelve runs to two. Spider Wells and Jimmy Lippit walked back with Tom and Willard—Jimmy Brennan had left them to hob nob with the redoubtable Doyle—and explained the defeat satisfactorily. Spider, flourishing his scorebook, proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that the game had been thrown away by poor generalship. Jimmy scoffed.
“Poor generalship nothing! Why, we couldn’t hit that red-headed professional, you chump! Nobody could! We all told Chester he had no business letting them pitch a fellow like that against us! What do you expect? Why, every fellow on their team was twenty years old or more. And at that they only got eleven hits off us!”
Tom and Willard left Jimmy and Spider at the corner of Washington and Linden Streets, still wrangling over the game, and went to Willard’s house. There, on the front steps, with the assistance of several slices of cake, they talked over Jimmy Brennan’s idea of renting the car evenings. In the end they decided to try the scheme, and Willard got a paper and pencil and between them they drew up an announcement to be printed on cardboard and placed in the shop windows. When finally corrected the legend ran as follows:
AUTOMOBILE FOR HIRE!
The Benton and Morris Transportation Company’s Five-Passenger Touring Car, with experienced chauffeur, may be engaged for pleasure rides any evening after seven o’clock. Terms, Two Dollars an hour. Make up your parties! Apply to Thomas Benton, 37 Cross St.
“There,” said Willard, “that ought to fill the bill. We’ll get Higginson to print about two dozen of these and we’ll put them in the store windows. Bet you we’ll get a lot of bids!”
“Will the store-keepers let us put them in their windows, though?” asked Tom. “I don’t see why they should.”