Chapter XVI: The Regulars Arrive

Kennedy was determined to find out where the busher got his liquor. Savage’s attitude next day greatly strengthened that determination. Not only did he refuse to tell anything about it, but he brazenly denied having had anything intoxicating at all. He reeled off a lot of ancient stuff about taking colic medicine, which struck the manager temporarily dumb.

Recovering, old Jack spat out some verbal vitriol which made even Savage wince. Kennedy then held confab with Jack Stillman, after which the reporter proceeded to corner the hotel proprietor, and, with his usual dexterity, painlessly extract the facts he sought. They were brief and singularly discouraging. The land across the river for almost a mile in either direction was owned by one Caspar Livermore, a well-to-do planter and horse breeder. Mr. Livermore was not only extremely penurious, but had the reputation of being a prohibitionist of the deepest dye, to whom the mere mention of intoxicants was like a red rag to a bull. There were no other habitations of any sort save the hut of a decrepit old negro woman, reputed among the superstitiously inclined of her race to have dealings with the devil. Even that hut, which was on Livermore land, stood a good half-mile above the rotten old boathouse.

“Looks as if the old lady might bear investigating,” Stillman said afterward to Locke, “though it’s usually safe to be suspicious of these guys that throw a fit at the sight of a whisky advertisement. They’re often the kind who lap up sixty per cent. alcohol patent medicines by the gallon. I reckon I’d better hunt up a boat, and be ready in case there’s anything doing to-night.”

With considerable difficulty, he managed to locate a flat-bottomed scow, which he conveyed by the sweat of his brow to a point about a quarter of a mile above the boathouse. Unfortunately, after all this labor, there was no occasion to use it that night. After dinner Savage lounged around the lobby in solitary silence for half an hour or so. At half past seven he sallied forth to one of the moving-picture shows. Lefty and Stillman were both prepared to swear that this time he not only entered the Palace Theater, but remained there until the last foot of film had been shown. That over, he returned to the hotel, and treated himself to the luxury of several wordy altercations before bedtime.

Kennedy was annoyed by their report. The desire to learn the source of the perplexing pitcher’s drink supply was becoming an obsession with the manager, and he urged them to continue their sleuthing. To this both ball player and newspaper man agreed. They, too, were becoming more than vexed at the success which seemed to attend Savage’s every maneuver.

Hustling back from the field that afternoon, however, every thought of the delinquent busher was driven from Lefty’s brain by the sight of four men lounging in the hotel lobby. They were cleanly built, well set-up specimens, remarkable mainly for the almost miraculous fit of their very up-to-date garments, and for rather blasé manners. At the sight of Locke the latter mood vanished as if it had never been. They fell upon the southpaw as one man, slapping his back with a fond enthusiasm which fairly took his breath away.

It was the vanguard of the “regulars”――the men whose names were familiar household words the country over. It was small wonder that they carried themselves with a little air. The surprising thing was that they could fling that air aside, as they were doing now, to greet with hearty, genuine boyish delight the comrade they had not seen in months.

When the rougher preliminaries were over tongues began to wag in chorus as Lefty was informed how the various men had passed the winter. Dirk Nelson, the steady, dependable, rather quiet backstop, had been, as usual, on his farm in Maryland.

“And don’t you believe it wasn’t hard to come away just when things were getting ready to sprouts,” he concluded, with his slow, attractive smile. “Golly, if I’d saved up as much mazuma as old Herman Brosk, I’d sure quit the game!”

“Yes, you would!” exclaimed Rufe Hyland skeptically. Rufe looked after the Blue Stocking right field in summer, and spent his few leisure winter months in presiding as capably over a well-equipped gymnasium on Sixth Avenue. The gym was merely a diversion, however. With him baseball was the only thing worth while. “Yes, you would,” he repeated――“for about one month! Then you’d be back hustling to sign on again.”

“That’s right,” chimed in Kid Lewis, the peppery little shortstop. “It’s a mighty fine thing after the post season to know you don’t have to play ball for three solid months, but if you thought it was for good――suffering cats! Why, come February, when a fellow’s blood begins to stir, I leave my little old two-by-four cigar store on Pennsylvania Avenue without even tellin’ it good-by.”

“Say, Kid,” inquired Torrey, the change catcher, curiously, “how’s that business pay, anyhow? You must pull in quite a bunch of mazuma just because you’re a Blue Stocking.”

“Oh, I do pretty well,” returned Lewis. “It ain’t as if I was the real thing, like Lefty here”――he grinned, and ducked under the sweep of Locke’s arm――“but there’s plenty of decent fellows who are willing to buy their smokes even from an outfielder. Say, look what’s coming! Whew! Some class to the old hoss, ain’t there?”

The others turned to behold Laughing Larry Dalton, with his brown eyes and gay, careless smile. He was arrayed in a suit of amazing checks, sported a three-carat diamond in a startling scarf, and was preceded by a small darky staggering under the load of very new and very English-looking luggage.

“Solomon’s glory!” gasped Hyland. “I thought I was some dressed, but―― Say, old man, who wished it on you, anyhow?”

“Ain’t he immense!” cried Lewis. “Pipe that chunk of alum weighing down his manly bosom! Can you beat it?”

“Jack’s got a cub who’s jest set his heart on your job, old horse,” put in Nelson seriously, “and won’t take no for an answer. How about it?”

“Hush!” said Lefty, with upraised hand. “You boys are pretty raw, talking like that to a real actor. Didn’t you know little Larry’s been on the stage all winter? Talk about side――why, it sticks out all over him.”

Dalton was quite unaffected by the comments on his personal appearance. His smile widened as he shook hands with one after another of his teammates.

“Glad you like my get-up,” he drawled. “I thought these were some togs myself. Came pretty near starting a riot when I did my turn in it out at Salt Lake.”

“You were the handsome, curly-haired hero, I s’pose?” said Hyland.

“Nothing like that for me!” retorted Dalton. “I was the villain. Great dope, fellows! Before I quit the show I used to get sore as a crab if I wasn’t hissed enough.”

Lefty was highly amused by the mental picture of the laughing-eyed, happy-go-lucky chap doing the heavy villain. By this time the lobby was filled with curious recruits pausing on their way to showers, and newspaper men who quickly joined the circle. Kennedy appeared, and shook hands in his friendly fashion, exhorting them to have “plenty of pep this year.” The reporters stood about, laughing and joshing familiarly, and making mental notes for the daily wire home.

After dinner, while they were all gathered in the lobby, joking and discussing old times, two more arrivals blew in. Handsome Billy Orth, from his orange plantation in California, had picked up Joe Welsh, who owned a small cattle ranch in Arizona, and who affected rattlesnake-skin four-in-hands and hatbands.

“Back to the land of ’simmons and sore arms!” greeted Dalton. “By heck, Joe, you look kinky as the deuce! I’ll bet you’ll be down with a case of Charley horse inside a week. William, what do you think of this foxy shark――Locke here――sneaking down with the cubs and getting all limbered up ahead of us?”

Orth and Lewis joshed back. And so it went. There was a pleasant sense of friendliness about the whole affair which made Lefty regret the promise he and Stillman had given to keep an eye on Nels Savage.

He was not incommoded in the least by it. Savage did not leave the hotel, but spent the evening lolling about the lobby and playing pool with Pete Zacher. Locke and Stillman were puzzled enough to know what to make of such behavior, but when the third evening passed, and the fourth, and the fifth, without a single dereliction from duty on the part of the bush twirler, they began to believe that his last experience had taught him something. Then, to upset this theory, the reporter learned of several attempts that Savage had made to wheedle a drink out of one of the older men. He was just as disagreeable as he had ever been, while his pitching, though it showed occasional brief spells of cleverness, continued to make old Jack shake his head and mutter.

“He ain’t used the spitter once since he landed,” the manager commented to Stillman one afternoon. Like more than one other baseball man, he did not hesitate to open his mind to this reporter, who had never once offended by sending the wrong thing to his paper. “Says he don’t want to do it till he’s warmed up. That may be so, or it may not, but I never yet see a spitball flinger that wasn’t trying it every little while.”

Two days later Kennedy announced the first five-inning practice game to take place next morning at eight-thirty between the Regulars and the Yannigans, as the recruits were called. Since their arrival the former had been warming up with even greater leisure than the youngsters. From experience they knew well how an apparently trifling strain or twisted muscle at this crucial stage was likely to develop into something serious later on.

Even the prospect of the first game left them cool and unperturbed. On the other hand, the cubs, thrilled with the notion of showing off before Kennedy, hustled around, perfecting an elaborate system of signals and indulging in various other stunts which merely emphasized their “cubbishness.”