"'Yes,' I told him. 'They get paid.'
"'I don't believe it!' he would rant.
"And 'round and 'round we would go. We'd actually have that same argument, almost always word-for-word, at least once a week. Twice a week in the summer. Sometimes my grandfather—my father's father—would get involved in it. My grandfather was a nice man who liked baseball, and he would usually take my side.
"'Listen,' he'd say to my father, 'when you were a youngster, I wanted you to be something, too. I wanted you to be a stonecutter, same as I was when I came over from the old country.' Oh, did I mention before that my grandfather was a stonecutter?"
"No," replied Elephant. "You just said that he was a nice man who liked baseball."
"Okay," said Rube's shadow. "Well, my grandfather had been a stonecutter, and had tried to persuade Dad to become one, too. 'But no!' he would say loudly into my father's ear, 'You wouldn't listen. You wanted to be an engineer. So you became an engineer. And a darned good one, too. Had I forced you into masonry, you would never have excelled in the craft for which you had no love. And you would have been very unhappy. Now Richard wants to be a baseball player. He's so determined that nothing is going to stop him. Let's give him a chance and see what he can do. Don't force the boy to give up on his dreams.'"
"Your grandfather sounds like a wise man to me," said Ozma.
"He was," said the shadow. "But Dad would never listen. 'Ballplayers are no good,' he'd insist. 'Ballplayers are no good, and they never will be any good.' It was very frustrating. He would usually end the argument by slamming the door and going outside to sit on the porch. And he would stop speaking to my grandfather or me for hours at a time."
"That's too bad," said Tweaty. "If you were good at baseball, you should have stuck with it."
"But I did stick with it," replied the shadow. "I told you, I just came from a game."