"You were right, Pete," he said. "They are watching us from there."
"Let's chase them out of there, Jack!"
"Not a bit of it, Pete. I don't want them to know we've found out they're there—not now, at any rate. If they're mean enough to try to find something out by spying that way, I'll be mean enough to give them something to look at that won't do them much good!"
"Say, Jack, that's the stuff! That's better than giving them a licking, too. What'll you do?"
"Just wait and see! And hit these balls just as hard as you can."
The ball looked as big as a house now to Pete as it came sailing up to him. Mysteriously all the "stuff" that Jack had been "putting on" the ball was gone and done with. The balls Jack pitched now were either straight or broke so widely that almost anyone could have batted home runs galore off him. And Pete, who saw the point, swung wildly at every one of them, hitting them easily.
"That's a fine joke," said Pete. "They won't find out very much about what you can do as a pitcher from that—that's a sure thing! If Lawrence thinks that's the best thing you can do when you get in the box I'm afraid he'll get an awful jolt tomorrow."
"I hope so, Pete. The sneak—you were quite right. If he'd come right out to me and told me he wanted to watch me pitch, I wouldn't have minded. But that's a mean trick!"
"It won't do him much good, that's one good thing. Say, I don't believe he's as good himself as they make out, or he wouldn't have played such a trick. I bet he's got a big yellow streak in him."
"We'll find that out tomorrow, Pete. I hope not, because he certainly knows how to pitch. If he does a thing like that, though, he'd be apt to try to cheat in the game, or do something like that, I'm afraid. I don't care, though. If he wants to win in any such fashion as that, he's welcome to the victory. He must want to win worse than I do."