Chapter IV

On Saturday Willie Trigger swallowed his dinner in an incredibly short space of time, and slipped from the house unobserved, while his mother was in the kitchen haggling with a huckster over the Sunday vegetables. When the good woman re-entered the dining-room she cast one glance at Willie's half depleted plate, then rushed through the dark, cool hall and out upon the porch.

"Will-_ee_! Will-_ee_!" she called, stridently.

A rustling of the leaves as the breath of June wafted among them, was her answer. She went to the gate and gazed up and down the street. Then with a sigh she returned to the house and closed the door.

Perhaps Willie had not heard the maternal call. At the instant of its issue he was balanced on the top of the back fence across the street, hidden from the maternal eye by the intervening house. At the second call he plumped down upon a soft ash heap on the other side. If he did hear he gave no sign, but, after dusting his pantaloons with little flips and pats of his small brown hands, he ran with all the speed that he could muster, across the wide, uneven lot. Presently he became lost to sight among the gnarled and broken trees of a once prolific apple orchard, beyond. Issuing from the orchard on the farther side, he crossed another lot--first wriggling wormlike beneath a low wire fence--and came out into the dusty road that led to the old fair ground enclosure. To-day that road, as a wide, smooth street disfigured only by the tracks over which the flat-wheeled trolleys bump, marks the northern boundary of Ann Arbor's ultra exclusiveness. Behind hedges or half hidden amid the trees, nestle snug little houses that seem to cry out against all vulgar intrusion and hug themselves in the very joy of their most obvious respectability.

Along this road, thick with dust; now obscured in a cloud of his own raising, now distinct against the background of the high board fence, Willie Trigger trudged. Arriving at the long ticket window he was dismayed to find that the hatch was shut. Bunny had told him there would be a ticket for him at the window--a ticket for him expressly, in an envelope bearing his name, else he would not have deserted his dinner to be the first on hand. Save for a solitary woman whom he saw among the trees in the wood across the way, the region about appeared deserted. It was not yet one o'clock, but Willie Trigger did not realize this. Stoically he sat down at the edge of the long low platform below the ticket-office window and resigned himself to waiting.

After ten minutes a dog bounded from the wood into the road. Motionless, he regarded the lad curiously. As long as he remained in sight Willie amused himself by throwing stones at him.

After half an hour a carriage drew up close to the fence and stopped. He slouched over to the narrow pedestrians' gate at one side of the office. Two young men, carrying a large, black tin box between them, alighted from the vehicle, paid the driver and entered the enclosure, fastening the gate behind them. When they had disappeared Willie pulled at the gate but suddenly desisted in his attempt to force an entrance as the heavy hatch of the ticket-office fell with a bang and the same two young men were revealed at the weather beaten counter. He watched them as they unlocked the box, on the shiny top of which the bright sun gleamed, and saw one of them take out several big bunches of blue tickets. Willie approached the window, then, hesitatingly. His chin barely touched the edge of the shelf so he stood on his toes.

"Say--my ticket here?" he asked, boldly.

The young man who was arranging the bundles on the shelf looked down.

"What do _you_ want?" he inquired, tersely.

"I want my ticket."

"Got a quarter?"

Willie Trigger's toes gave way beneath him, but he bobbed up again almost instantly.

"He said there'd be one here--in a envelope."

"What?" snapped the young man, "_who_ said there would--what you _talking_ about anyway?"

Willie endeavored to explain. He was laughed at for his pains.

"Run along now," the officious young man commanded. "There ain't any ticket for you here. Run along--or--or--I'll call a policeman."

The mouth, then the nose, then the eyes, then the little gray cap of Willie Trigger descended below the window ledge and he commenced to sniffle. A large, jagged stone lay on the grass not ten feet away, and as his eyes fell upon it his sniffling ceased. He picked up the stone. He poised it in the air an instant, then with all the strength at his command he flung it diagonally across the fence. He heard the clatter as it struck the thin boards at the end of the ticket office. He did not linger to observe any further effect of his assault, for when the officious young man who had denied to him the existence of his ticket, crawled upon the ledge and gazed off down the road, there was no little boy in sight.

Chagrined though he was, Willie did not for an instant accuse his hero of any lack of faithlessness. Indeed, as is the wont of small boyhood, he accepted the rebuff unquestioningly. He made no effort at analysis. It was merely a whimsical cavort of that unreliable Fate that not infrequently plays tricks on those who walk in knickerbockers. So Willie, nothing loth, reasoned simply that as a ticket had never been necessary before, he was quite prepared to gain an entrance to the grounds without one, now. Indeed, even as the young man in the office climbed upon the ledge and gazed off down the road, Willie was examining the fence for loose boards, along the familiar stretch behind the ancient grand stand. Many times and oft, when ball games were in progress, had he, with the assistance of Jimmy Thurston, clambered over that tall board fence frequently to the complete demolishment of his shirt waist, which had a nasty habit of catching on the barbs of the wire that an ingenious care-taker had strung along the top, but, in any event, successfully, to the more important issue of an entrance to the field. To-day, however, he was alone, and getting over the fence was quite a different matter. Since Thursday he had not caught a glimpse of Jimmy, but now he was wishing that the fat, familiar figure of the lad would appear around the corner of the fence. There was not a loose board along the whole stretch, so far as he could discover. Not infrequently he had, with half a dozen sturdy jerks, succeeded in ripping off a plank sufficiently wide to permit of squeezing through; but two days before the same far seeing care-taker who, with so much ingenuity, profanity and trouble, had strung the barbed wire at the top, had gone over the entire stockade and nailed securely every board that seemed to him to be deficient in tightness. It is saddening to tell it; for it rather weakens the character of Willie Trigger, but at the end of his second futile patrol along the fence, he flung himself down at the roots of an ancient apple-tree and cried. Were all the Fates of boyhood set against him this day in June?

"Dum it--gosh dum it," he mumbled, gazing through his tears at the forbidding fence, the top of which looked so low yet was so high--too high even when he poised on tiptoe and jumped, clutching. As he stared, his eyes opened wide, the tears were magically whisked away, and he grinned.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed aloud, and got upon his feet.

A branch of the very tree beneath which he had so disconsolately flung himself, pointed out the way he sought. A single limb--not a thick, sturdy limb, but rather a weak, unstable sort of limb--hung directly above the fence at a most favorable point, immediately behind the grand stand.

Willie Trigger climbed the tree. Cautiously he crept out upon the branch, more than half hidden by the foliage. The branch bent beneath his weight, slight though it was, and once he nearly slipped. His heart leaped into his mouth, or if not his heart, at least something, but he swallowed it back and moved along another inch. He wriggled obliquely until he balanced on his stomach like a bag of meal over a pole. Little by little he slipped down, the branch giving more and more with every movement of his agile body. He clung by the crook of his elbows and wriggled his toes. They touched nothing. For a space he danced upon the air. Another slip of scarce an inch, and there ensued a ripping and tear, followed by a sharp crack.

Thug!

Willie Trigger struck the soft earth in a sitting posture. The sudden contact resulted in a private pyrotechnic display of momentary brilliance. Willie gasped twice like a fish. Blinking away the stars and whirling Catherine wheels that glittered before his eyes, he looked about him. "Gosh!" he muttered below his breath, and rolling over rubbed the point of contact vigorously. Beside him lay the branch, but--goody! He had struck inside the fence! Moreover, and what was quite as much to the purpose, he had not been observed.

Sidling along the rear wall of the grand stand, he reached the corner and thrust out his head. The big gate was open--the gate through which he had hoped to pass big with pride, a man among his fellows. A steady current of humanity in summer garb was streaming through. There were carriages by the score, the horses driven by young men, many of whom Willie, from his peculiar point of vantage, recognized. On the seats beside them were girls--"their girls," he speculated mentally with an unvoiced sneer. But mostly the crowd was on foot, scrambling, pushing, jostling. Every individual in the throng seemed bent upon being the first to reach the grand stand and it was a fine sight to the small boy, peering around the corner, to see them run. Two men detached themselves from the crowd and seemed to him to be making directly for where he stood. Willie Trigger wasted no time in idle speculation as to their purpose. Turning heel he ran. He plunged around the upper end of the stand. The door there was open. He disappeared into the long room directly beneath the seats. He was familiar with the floor plan. He knew that the partition on his left was false and that the various little doors on the right opened into tiny dressing rooms. He knew that the one door on the left offered access, if unfastened, to the cramped and crowded space beneath the lower tiers of seats,--a dark hole used these many years as a catch-all for the _débris_ of the grounds, old cans, broken bottles, worn out shoes, and ancient hoop-skirts. He tried the door; it opened and he pulled it shut after him, just as the door at the end was flung back and the two men entered.

"Where's his room?" he heard asked, in an undertone; then the heavy footfalls on the loose boards of the floor.

His eyes became adjusted to the darkness and through the many chinks of the partition he perceived the men. He recognized them as those who had haggled with the hackman at the Cook House two days before. He held his breath, and, as there really was nothing else for him to do, became an eavesdropper.

"Punky, we got t' separate," Giddings said. "They'll be next if you don't; it'll be all right for you to drop in here while they're dressin' but don't be wise. And for heaven's sake, don't get gay; it's a long chance you're takin' and you'll take it I know, with five hundred dollars in the balance."

"Don't you worry," Punky replied significantly. "I'm takin' no chances; that's why I got the dope. You couldn't buy this Bunny for a million; and you say Morrison's as bad. You just leave it to me. I'll be hangin' around, you bet. When you're dishin' up the soft stuff, you just call me and say, 'Here, take this in there.' I'll take it--in she goes--and if it don't mean Morrison'll win this here Intercollegiate, I'm a lobster, good and plenty. They'd never git next in the world."

"Well, for heaven's sake don't put in too much," Giddings muttered.

"Leave it to me,"--was the terse reply and then they went into one of the dressing-rooms and their voices came only in muffled tone to Willie in his hiding-place.

He was not quite certain of the meaning of what he had heard. He was only certain of the name--"Bunny." Who these men were he did not dream. Besides, it was none of his affairs. There was one thing however that he _did_ know, and that definitely; he could not hope to see the sports from where he crouched. Noiselessly he opened the door. It did not creak. He tiptoed down the long room. As he neared the end, the door there was opened suddenly from without and a score of men pressed in. Willie Trigger whistled as loud as he could and walked on. The whistle, born of boyhood's genius, saved him. Ordinarily the presence of a small boy in the dressing-room would perhaps have occasioned surprise, but on this particular occasion the small boy whistled so shrilly and walked so independently with his hands deep in the pockets of his knickerbockers that no one spoke to him; no one seemed even to notice him. He strode out of the building bravely, crept under the fence at the side of the track and strolled into the paddock, scuffing the grass and still whistling.