“He’s afraid of him! He’s walking him. Boo! Boo!” came in good-natured banter. “Boo! Boo! Boo!” shouted the crowd. Whereupon Irons O, dropping his steel arm to his side, turned his head half around and, to the umpire’s surprise, let out wildcat howls that could be heard at the farthest end of the field.
“Get that umpire!” someone shouted. “Where’s that pop bottle?” But it was all in fun. The mechanical pitcher tightened up, pitched three sizzlers in a row. A moment later, a third man went out on a pop-up.
Johnny Thompson saw all of this inning. He saw very little of those that followed. In all that throng he was interested in just one man—the little dark fellow who had led the razzing when Irons O appeared to be down and out for good. Johnny had always been interested in the things people did and their reasons for doing them. This little dark man was a complete stranger to him. He wondered, at first in a vague sort of way, why he was such an ardent heckler. When Irons O had been put into service again, he thought he detected on the fellow’s face a look of disappointment and chagrin.
“What can he care?” Johnny asked himself.
All through the game he sat close to that man and watched him. He had once seen two large dogs fighting a battle for a bone. One had dropped the bone. It lay beneath their feet as they fought. A third dog, a sort of insignificant hungry-looking pug, had hovered near all during the fight, licking his chops but never quite daring to seize the bone. Somehow, in a strange sort of way, the expression on this little man’s face resembled that on the insignificant pug’s face.
“I wonder what his interest in this game can be!” the boy whispered. “I do wonder!”
As for Goggles, during his spare moments while his team-mates were at bat, he was wondering about an entirely different matter. The men from the big airplane had caught his attention at once. When one of them, evidently a skilled mechanic, had interested himself in their problem and aided them in solving it, he had completely won Goggles’ heart. But Goggles’ interest went farther than that. “They came here to see this game. Probably came all the way from the big city, three hundred miles away,” he told himself. “I wonder why?” For the time he could form no satisfying answer.
In the meantime the game went on. Bernard caught the ball as it came back from the catcher. He caught a pop-up fly now and then and also threw bases. To the excitement of the throng, Irons O did the rest. He pitched a good game too, but no better than the smiling pitcher from Centralia. Goggles had always admired that Centralia pitcher, but never as now. Now, as he directed the pitching of Irons O, as the score went from 3 to 4, to 6-5; then from 7-8 to 8-10, his sympathies were evenly balanced between the man of iron and the man of brawn. Who was to win? Well enough he knew that in the end it was up to him to decide.
And so it turned out to be. At the end of the first half of the ninth inning the score stood 10-9 in the iron man’s favor. At the beginning of the game they had tossed up to see who came first to bat. Centralia had lost, so now in the last half of the ninth they were up to bat.
“It’s up to Irons O,” Goggles breathed to Johnny as he went out on the field.