Chapter I: The Grouch

“Crooked? You never said a truer word in your life, Tethridge. Professional baseball’s so rotten it’s a wonder the board of health don’t get after it.”

The lean, slope-shouldered man sitting next to the window of the smoking car bent a puzzled glance on his more robust companion.

“Board o’ ’ealth?” he echoed, his sandy eyebrows arching in an odd note of interrogation. “I don’t tyke you, old chap. What ’ave the board o’ ’ealth to do with biseball?”

The young man at his elbow frowned, and pushed back a long lock of dark hair straggling down from under the straight brim of an exaggeratedly flat derby.

“Nothing,” he answered, in a resigned tone. “That was only my little joke, old man. In such a bad state the board of health is needed. Get me?”

For a second or two the Englishman preserved that expression of stolid inquiry. Then, suddenly as cracks radiate over a sheet of heavy glass fractured by a stone, that long, solemn face broke into curving lines, and he laughed in a booming bass note quite out of keeping with the lean, narrow-chested figure. “Jolly good, old chap! My word! I ’ad no ideah you was such a bloomin’ joker, Nelson.”

He nudged his companion in the ribs. The latter, striving unsuccessfully to dismiss the expression of utter boredom from his tanned, rather rough-hewn face, pulled a package of cheap cigarettes from his pocket and offered them to the man by the window. Tethridge declined the cigarettes in favor of a blackened, disreputable-looking brier.

“The whole proposition’s as crooked as the fighting game,” declared the man called Nelson; “an’ that’s saying a whole lot, believe me! The crowd that runs it is out for the coin, an’, take my word, they squeeze the public and rob their white slave players to get it.”

He paused a second to send a swift sidelong glance at G. Munby Tethridge, who nodded instant agreement. In the seat just ahead a clean-cut, alert-looking man, with keen brown eyes and a firm chin, moved his broad shoulders impatiently, and frowned at the magazine lying open on one knee.

“Gas bag!” he muttered under his breath.

“Look at the post season last year,” pursued the maligner of organized baseball viciously. “Two-thirds or more o’ the tickets handed over to speculators, an’ anybody wantin’ to see a game had to pay double or triple. Do you think them speculators didn’t have to whack up with the management? Sure they did! It was a put-up job.”

“What I always contended,” agreed the Englishman, pulling hard on the odorous pipe. “A bally crooked gyme through an’ through. Tyke a look at the w’y it’s pl’yed. Anything goes, by Jove, so long as a man ain’t caught. He’ll swear himself black in the fice he wasn’t put out when he was, or that he touched every bise when maybe he missed one; and the lies all go if the umpire didn’t ’appen to see ’im. That’s no gentleman’s gyme, old chap, like cricket, or any other decent sport. There ain’t any honor about it.”

The harsh, penetrating voice, with its irritatingly positive intonation, was audible through the greater part of the half-empty smoker. The brown-eyed young man in front, having ceased making even a pretense at reading, was scowling out at the snow-covered landscape. His expression was one of deep indignation. A muscular hand gripped the edge of the magazine with unconscious force. One foot beat lightly and impatiently on the rod beneath the seat in front of him.

“Huh!” grunted Nelson. “That ain’t nothing. I could sit here by the hour, an’ tell you a line o’ stories that ’u’d make your hair curl. Here’s jest one of ’em I calls to mind: A coupla seasons ago there was a fresh young piece o’ cheese pitching with us that called himself Fred Moore. At that it wasn’t no more his real name than it was mine. He was one o’ these college dudes, playing on his college nine; an’ then, come vacation, he beats it to some far-off bushes, where he pitches professional ball for the rest of the summer under a false monaker. There’s honor for you, ain’t it? That’s the sort of thing as sickens me of the whole business, an’ makes me swear to cut the game the minute I can root out something that’ll bring me in enough coin to live on.”

He hesitated, his scowling glance resting for a second on the broad shoulders of the man in front. At that moment a dark flush, rising from the immaculate collar, had just reached the edge of that heavy brown mane; but apparently Nelson was too moved by his own eloquence to observe this danger signal.

“It’s them college muckers mostly who’ve put the profession where it is to-day,” he went on hotly. “They cheat to go through college, and afterward in baseball they’ll do any crooked thing that’ll help ’em to get ahead of some square, decent man. Look at what happened in the Panthers last year. They was both college dudes, you can bet!”

Mr. Tethridge arched his sandy brows in an expression of curiosity.

“W’at was that?” he inquired quickly. “I don’t seem to remember what ’appened. Dessey it was after I left.”

“It was.” Nelson’s rather full lips curled at the remembrance. “It was the last game of the season between the Panthers an’ Bucks――a double header at that. Didn’t make any difference who won. Panthers bound to stay tail-enders, you know. A guy named Benson, playin’ third, wanted to boost his hittin’ average for the season, so he makes up to Grant, pitchin’ for the Bucks. They was both from the same college, and as sure I sit here, bo, every time that crook Benson comes to bat that other crook Grant lets him make a hit. He was up ten times in the two games, and you can guess what that did to his batting average. That’s your college ball player all over. Do you wonder I hate the very sight of one?”

Tethridge shook his head slowly.

“Not I,” he drawled. “Strynge what rotters education makes of men over hyer. But, I s’y, old chap, ’ow is it nobody saw this an’ myde a ’owl about it?”

In the barely perceptible pause before Nelson answered, the brown-haired man in the forward seat half turned his head with an impulsive movement, his lips parted as if he meant to speak. His face was flushed, his eyes sparkled with anger, but before he could get in a word the pessimistic ball player was speaking again.

“They did,” he answered crisply. “It was too much for even the machine to pull off. The crowd got suspicious, and the reporters took it up. Result was the management had to clear themselves by firing Grant; but, o’ course, all he did was to change his name and get a job with another league.”

“Are you quite sure about that?”

The new voice, breaking in upon the conversation, was superficially quiet, almost drawling. There was a faint undercurrent of something quite different in it, however, which made Nelson hastily raise his head to stare in annoyed surprise at the man in the forward seat, who had turned round upon them.

“Huh?” he grunted, noting in a flash the keen brown eyes and uncompromising chin of the stranger. “’Course I am. What do you know about it, anyhow?”

“I happen to know that both Benson and Grant were blacklisted, and never got back into organized baseball,” was the ready retort. “Benson’s pitching for a wildcat Texas team; Grant’s on the Pacific coast. Moreover, you seem to have forgotten that the manager of the Bucks was also dropped by the president of the league, who did everything in his power to show that such scandals would not be tolerated for an instant.”

Nelson flushed angrily. “_Is_ that so?” he inquired sarcastically. “Reg’lar walking baseball guide, ain’t you? I s’pose somebody was kidding you with this song and dance about Benson, an’ you swallowed it hook, line, an’ sinker. That’s about your style.”

“Not quite,” returned the stranger coolly. “I happened to pitch against him last spring at Ashland, the Hornets’ training camp, you know. He calls himself Pete Nevens now.”