"'Where are you going now?' asked the firemen.
"'Back home to Cleveland,' I told them.
"'Have you got any money?' they asked me.
"'No,' I answered. I had to be honest, after all.
"So they got up a little pool of about five dollars and said, 'Well, on your way. And use this to get something to eat.'
"I thanked them, and as I left I told them that some day I would be back again. 'When I get to the Big Leagues,' I said, I'm coming out to visit you when we get to Chicago.'
"And home I went. I played around home all the rest of the summer, and then the next summer—that would have been 1907, if I recall correctly, even though I'm remembering things that have yet to happen and I'm remembering them backwards—I took a job with an ice cream company in Cleveland. I made twenty-five dollars a week: Fifteen for checking the cans on the truck that would take the ice cream away, and ten dollars a Sunday, when I pitched for the company team. It was a good team. We played the best semipro clubs in the Cleveland area, and I beat them all. I was only seventeen, but I hardly lost a game.
"Then one day I got a postal card from the Cleveland Ball Club, asking me to come in and talk to them. Mr. Kilfoyl and Mr. Somers, the owners of the club, wanted to see me."
"Hurray!" said Hootsey. "So then, your father must have come around by then?"
"Hardly!" said the shadow. "My Dad saw the postal card and became very upset. 'So,' he said to me. 'I see that you still want to be a ballplayer.'