The Man with the Ball in the Underground Alley
At the bottom I found myself at one end of a dimly lighted room, very long and very narrow, like an enclosed alley; and near by was the boy, and beside him a grown man, both intent on something at the other end of the room. The man was swinging in his right hand a large wooden ball, and as I watched him he cried out, laughing cheerily:
“Never mind, Figli! This time I’ll make a strike! Only forty-seven more to make! Now watch!”
He hurled the ball from him along the floor, and it rolled swiftly to the far end of the room, where it crashed in among ten large wooden bottles, standing upright on the floor. He was playing tenpins.
“Oh!” cried the boy called Figli. “Only seven!”
“Never mind, never mind,” said the Bowler, cheerfully, and ran up the alley and set up the pins, and then ran back with the ball, in great haste. As he came back, he appeared to look directly at me, but gave no sign of having seen me. I scanned his face closely. He was blind. His hair and beard were black, and he had no eyebrows.
The boy flung out his hands as if in despair, and cried:
“It’s no use! You can’t do it! Forty-seven strikes to make by midnight! Oh, he’ll give you to Goolk the Spider! What shall I do? What shall I do?”
“Perhaps I can help you,” said I, coming forward.
The boy sprang up, and the Blind Bowler wheeled round toward me.