"It's really useless," said Smith, guessing the girl's thought. "If any one's missing, it's because he's home sick in bed. Now, tell me how much you need to be told."
Nearly everything, it seemed; so for the next ten minutes her companion held forth in a compendious but concise exordium on the great American game. During this interim the huge concrete stands filled entirely, and the populace began to spill over onto the field.
"That means ground rules—hit into the crowd good for only two bases," said several critics, for the general information of an ambient air fully as well informed as the speakers.
Down on the field the interesting machinery was in process of oiling—the batting and fielding practice of either side in turn, the pitchers lazily warming up, the motley crew on the side lines in their amusing and alert play of high-low. Helen, fascinated by the players' movements, the accurate interception of stinging grounders, the graceful parabolas of long flies to the deep outfield, as well as by the spectacle of the orderly base and coaching lines laid out on the smooth, close-clipped greensward, watched as though in a new medium of sight. This was little like anything she had ever seen.
A yell from ten thousand throats announced that the Giants'—and the crowd's—favorite was to pitch. Another yell, though less in volume, indicated that the opposing pitcher also was named and approved, not from any delight in the selection, but merely that the choice was made. The umpires in their sober blue uniforms took their places; the home team went into the field; the pitcher picked up the new white ball and settled his foot firmly on the slab—and the game was on.
It can serve no useful purpose now, when that game is done and its year's pennant determined, to play over the two hours' traffic of it. Suffice it to say that the tide of battle rose and fell sufficiently to keep forty thousand delirious spectators on their feet at least one quarter of the time. Nothing of Oriental calm about the crowd that day; nothing of passive acceptance of whatever the Fates might have in store. Every soul within that enclosure was a rabid partisan, bound up in the fortune of the fray; and if the concentrated desire of forty thousand minds could avail aught, the home team should certainly have felt the psychic urge.
But apparently they did not, or perhaps the opposing cohorts felt a far-off urge more potent still, for the game wore on to the seventh inning with the home team still one run behind.
"Seventh inning; everybody up!" twenty thousand informed the other twenty thousand. And everybody rose, the forty thousand almost as one man.
"Now then, you Tim!" shrieked a voice behind Helen's ear. And Tim responded with a two-base hit to the left field crowd. Another sharp crack of the ball against the bat, and men running at lightning speed, one to first base, one desperately rounding third and toward the home plate with the run needed to tie the score. But the Chicago team were busy as well. As from a catapult the ball shot home to the catcher, waiting astride the rubber.
A flash, a slide, a cloud of dust. Then the umpire, flapping a flippant thumb skyward. Then a berserker roar of rage, a pandemonium of fury beside which Babel was a soundless desert. And from leather-like lungs four inches from Helen's ear, in a voice which could have brought the glad news from Ghent to Aix without leaving the first-named city at all, came:—