“You’d be in good company,” said Dud.
“Meaning you?” asked the other, as he turned the canoe back toward home. “Oh, you’ll get your chance, Dud. Mount Morris has got some hitters, they say, and if she has neither Myatt nor Nate Leddy will last the games through. As for Brunswick, I guess he’s a goner for this year.”
“There’s Weston, though.”
“That’s so, too. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see Gus turn around and pitch a corking game some day soon. I guess the trouble with Gus is that he’s too temperamental. He and I are alike that way. If the weather isn’t just right or the moon’s in the wrong quarter or the tide’s too high or his shoe pinches him, Gus can’t pitch a little bit. But some day all the signs are going to be just right, and Gus will slip on a pair of old shoes, and he will go out there and make ’em eat out of his hand.” Jimmy paused. Then: “Maybe,” he added cautiously, “you can’t tell about Gus. Like me, he has the artistic temperament.”
“Well,” said Dud, after a long silence and as they swung the canoe into the Cove, “I hope you get into all the Mount Morris games, Jimmy, and do finely. And I hope,” he added wistfully, “that they let me pitch an inning or two in one of them. I—I’d like that.”
“And I,” responded Jimmy, “hope as how you gets your hope! Easy on! Let her run, sonny!”
It looked the next day as though Jimmy might be right about Gordon Parker, for although that youth was back for practice with his leg evidently as useful as ever, he did not get back into the outfield when the first and second lined up for the practice game. Instead, Boynton played in right, Jimmy in center and Ordway in left until the fifth inning, when Star Meyer took Jimmy’s place, much to that youth’s disgust. Leddy and Weston pitched that afternoon. Ben Myatt had been more affected by the heat on Saturday than he or anyone else had suspected at the time, and was said to be nursing himself for the next day’s game with Corliss College. Save for pitching to the batters in practice, neither Dud nor Brunswick did any work that afternoon. Dud watched the game from the bench and listened, during the last two innings, to Jimmy’s frank expressions of hurt feelings. Every time a fly ball went into center field Jimmy watched it hopefully.
“Hope he muffs it! Hope he mu—— Isn’t that rotten luck? Anyway, that’s a bum throw-in! If I couldn’t do better than that—sometimes—I wouldn’t try to get an honest man’s job away from him. Say, you’re next, Churchill. Knock a long one into center, will you? Put it about fifty feet over Meyer’s head, like a good fellow!”