"Well," said Lisa indignantly, "a good father would have encouraged you to go. He should have been able to see that you were good at what you did, and that you deserved this chance to make good."
"Absolutely," agreed Hootsey. "But I don't expect that your father gave you the money. Did you ever get to Waterloo?"
"Well," answered the shadow, "pretty soon I got a telegram from the Waterloo manager. He said that I had been recommended very highly by Howard Wakefield, and asked if I would like to come and try out for the team. The Waterloo manager offered to reimburse the cost of transportation if I was given a contract."
"But you still couldn't get the money from your father," said Ozma.
"No," sighed the ballplayer. "It was hardly an improvement over Howard's letter. So I just went upstairs to my room and closed the door. Then I wrote back a long letter to the Waterloo manager, explaining that I didn't have any money for transportation. But I told him that, if he sent me an advance right now for transportation, I'd be on the very next train to Waterloo and he could take it out of my salary later on."
"That's assuming you were hired, of course," said Lisa.
"Yes," agreed Rube. "But I didn't have the slightest doubt that I would make good. And, of course, I didn't mention that I was only sixteen years old. I thought it best to leave that out.
"I mailed the letter to Iowa, and then I waited on pins and needles for an answer. Every day I had to be the first one to get at the mail, because if anyone else saw a letter to me from the Waterloo Ball Club—well, that would have been enough to alert Dad to what was going on and I'd have been sunk. So every day I waited for the first sign of the mailman and tried to get to him before he reached the house. As it turned out, I could have saved myself a lot of worrying."
"No letter ever came?" guessed Lisa.
"Nope. Three weeks passed and still no answer." The shadow sighed again. "I couldn't understand what had gone wrong. Maybe it was against the rules to send transportation money to somebody not yet under contract? Maybe they didn't know how good I really was? Maybe this and maybe that. It was another frustrating period of my life. Finally, I just couldn't stand it any longer. I gave my folks a story about camping with the Boy Scouts and hitch-hiked to Waterloo."