The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Billy shrieked his triumph and danced ecstatically on the mignonette bed. It was true! The Great Discovery was proved.

Again he tried the experiment and again the ball yielded to the magic influence of the bat as the needle of a compass yields to the influence of the North Pole. Thrice the experiment worked perfectly. A fourth time the ball, having been placed further to the left, collided with the handle of the bat, jumped it and rolled over the edge of the porch into the flower bed. Billy waited for it to rise up and come back again, but that effort appeared beyond it. Considering that a distance of eighteen inches intervened between porch floor and flower bed, Billy felt that it would be asking too much of the ball. Anyway, it atoned a minute later by rolling nicely from house wall to bat with what seemed greater alacrity. Billy was more than satisfied.

I feel that I ought to inform the reader of a fact that quite escaped Billy, which is that the outer edge of the side porch was fully an inch and a half lower than the inner, being so built that water would run off it. I doubt if Billy ever knew of this. Certainly the slope was not perceptible to an unsuspicious vision. I make no claim that the slope of the porch floor had anything to do with the remarkable behavior of the ball. I am willing to believe that the ball would have rolled across to the bat had the floor been perfectly level. I only mention the fact in the interest of truth.

Later Billy sought the back yard and tried throwing the ball in the air and hitting it with the bat. At first this experiment proved less successful than the other, but presently he found, to his great delight, that he could hit almost every time! To be sure, he didn’t always hit just squarely, but he hit. That absorbing occupation came to an end when the ball went through a cellar window with a fine sound of breaking glass. Thereupon Billy recovered the ball and went innocently in to supper.

That night, for fear of burglary, Billy slept with the hoki-moki bat beside him under the covers.

The next day was Saturday and the day of the White Sox game. Billy spent most of the morning knocking the ball against the back yard fence and only desisted when Aunt Julia informed him from an upstairs window that she had a headache and would go crazy if he didn’t stop making all that noise. Billy stopped and went and sat on the side porch, with his feet in the mignonette and the hoki-moki bat hugged to his triumphant breast, and dreamed dreams worthy of Cæsar or Napoleon.

The Broadport Juniors wanted to win to-day’s game, wanted to win it more than they wanted to win any other contest in a long and comprehensive schedule. The White Sox team was comprised of boys who lived on the Hill. The Hill was the town’s patrician quarter. Just about everyone who lived up there had an automobile and a chauffeur to drive it and wore their good clothes all the time. The juvenile residents of that favored locality were, in the estimate of the down-town boys, stuck-up and snobbish, and they had a fine opinion of their baseball prowess. The worst of it was that their opinion was justified, for the White Sox—the down-towners jeeringly called them the Silk Sox—usually beat almost every team they went up against! Last year the Juniors had played two contests with them and had been beaten decisively each time. And so Captain Arthur Humbleton and all the other boys of the Juniors and all their adherents—including mothers and brothers and sisters and an occasional father—were especially keen on a victory. And when, in the first of the sixth inning, the White Sox finally solved Waldo’s delivery and made three hits and, aided by an infield error, sent four runs over the plate the Juniors’ bright dream faded and despondency gloomed the countenance of Captain Humbleton and his doughty warriors. The White Sox had already held a one-run lead, the score at the start of the sixth having been 12 to 11, and now, with four more tallies added, they looked to have the contest safely on ice.

Billy, his precious bat held firmly between his knees, occupied a seat on the substitute’s bench, a yellow-grained settee borrowed from the High School across the common. He had twice offered his services to Arthur and they had been twice refused, the second time with a scowl. Billy was absolutely certain that he could, if allowed to face the opposing batter, who hadn’t much but a fast ball to boast of, deliver wallops that would radically alter the history of the game. But the hoki-moki bat was no better than any little old sixty-cent stick so long as he was not allowed to use it. To his credit is the fact that he had determined, in case the White Sox still held the lead at the beginning of the ninth inning, to entrust the bat to others should Arthur still refuse his services. That was real self-denial, real patriotism. As much as Billy wanted to wield the wonderful hoki-moki bat himself victory for the team stood first.

The friends of the Juniors clapped and cheered as “Wink” Billings went to bat in the last of the sixth, and the one who cheered the loudest was Captain Ezra Blake. The Captain had come at Billy’s earnest and repeated behest and had togged himself out wonderfully in honor of the occasion. The Captain did not, Billy suspected now, know a great deal about baseball, for he cheered just as loudly when a villainous White Sox rapped out a two-bagger as he did when one of the Juniors stole home from third. But it was very evident that the Captain’s intentions were of the best.