Lefty Locke Pitcher-Manager. Standish Burt L.
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Weegman rose, chuckling and snapping his fingers. “All this talk about what the Feds can do is gas!” he declared. “They’re getting nothing but the soreheads and deadwood of organized baseball, which will be vastly better off without the deserters. Cripples and has-beens may make a good thing out of the Feds for a short time. Perhaps Locke would find it profitable to jump.” His meaning was all too plain.
Lefty felt like taking the insinuating fellow by the neck and shaking him until his teeth rattled, but outwardly he was not at all ruffled or disturbed. “Mr. Weegman,” he said, “is showing pique because I have not seen fit to sign up as manager of the Blue Stockings. He professes to have authority from Charles Collier to sign the manager, Collier having gone abroad for his health.”
“If anybody doubts my authority,” shouted Weegman, plunging his hand into an inner pocket of his coat, “I can show the documents that will–”
The southpaw had turned his back on him. “I understand you have a clever pitcher in the man known as Mysterious Jones, Wiley,” he said.
“A pippin!” was the enthusiastic answer. “I’ll give you a chance to see him sagaciate to-day.”
“He is a deaf-mute?”
“He couldn’t hear a cannon if you fired it right under the lobe of his ear, and he does his talking with his prehensile digits. Leon Ames in his best days never had anything on Jones.”
“Strange I never even heard of him. Our scouts have scoured the bushes from one end of the country to the other.”
“I never collided with any baseball scouts in Alaska,” said Wiley.
“Oh! You found Jones in Alaska?”
“Pitching for a team in Nome.”
“But baseball up there! I didn’t know–”
“Oh, no; nobody ever thinks of baseball up there, but in the all too short summer season there’s something doing in that line. Why, even modern dances have begun to run wild in Alaska, so you see they’re right up to the present jiffy.”
“Where did this Jones originally hail from?”
“Ask me! I don’t know. Nobody I ever met knew anything about him, and what he knows about himself he won’t tell. He’s mysterious, you understand; but his beautiful work on the slab has caused my classic countenance to break into ripples and undulations and convolutions of mirth.”
“Where is he? I’d like to give him the once over.”
“I think he’s out somewhere prowling around the town and sizing up the citizens. That’s one of his little vagaries; he has a combustable curiosity about strangers. Every place we go he wanders around for hours lamping the denizens of the burg. Outside baseball, strange people seem to interest him more than anything in the world; but once he has taken a good square look at a person, henceforth and for aye that individual ceases to attract him; if he ever gives anybody a second look, it is one of absolute indifference. Oh, I assure you with the utmost voracity that Jones is an odd one.”
“He must be,” agreed Lefty.
“Ay tank, cap’n,” said Oleson, the Swede outfielder, “that Yones now bane comin’ up the street.”
Wiley turned and gazed at an approaching figure. “Yes,” he said, “that’s him. Turn your binnacle lights on him, Lefty; behold the greatest pitcher adrift in the uncharted regions of baseball.”
CHAPTER VI
PECULIAR BEHAVIOR
Jones was rather tall and almost slender, although he had a fine pair of shoulders. His arm was as long as Walter Johnson’s. His face was as grave as that of the Sphinx, and held more than a touch of the same somber sadness. His eyes were dark and keen and penetrating; with a single glance they seemed to pierce one through and through. And they were ever on the move, like little ferrets, searching, searching, searching. As he approached the hotel, he met a man going in the opposite direction, and he half paused to give the man a sharp, lance-like stare. Involuntarily the man drew aside a trifle and, walking on, turning to look back with an expression of mingled questioning and resentment. But Jones had resumed his habitual pace, his appearance that of a person who, already overburdened, had received one more disappointment.
Barney O’Reilley, the shortstop, laughed. “Sure,” said he, “it’s a bit of a jump old Jonesy hands any one he looks at fair and hard.”
Lefty Locke felt a throb of deep interest and curiosity. There was something about the deaf-mute pitcher of the Wind Jammers that aroused and fascinated him instantly. His first thought was that the man might be mentally unbalanced to a slight degree; but, though he knew not why, something caused him to reject this conviction almost before it was formed. Apparently Jones was well named “Mysterious.”
“There’s the bird, Lefty,” said Cap’n Wiley proudly. “There’s the boy who’d make ’em sit up and take notice if ever he got a show in the Big League. Yours truly, the Marine Marvel, knew what he was doing when he plucked that plum in the far-away land of lingering snows.”
A queer sound behind him, like a hissing, shuddering gasp, caused Locke to look around quickly. The sound had come from Weegman, who, face blanched, mouth agape, eyes panic-stricken, was staring at the approaching pitcher. Amazement, doubt, disbelief, fear–he betrayed all these emotions. Even while he leaned forward to get a better view over the shoulder of a man before him, he shrank back, crouching like one ready to take to his heels.
Like a person pleased by the sound of his own voice, Cap’n Wiley rattled on in laudation of his mute pitcher. No one save Locke seemed to notice Weegman; and so wholly fascinated by the sight of Jones was the latter that he was quite oblivious to the fact that he had attracted any attention.
“Smoke!” Wiley was saying. “Why, mate, when he uses all his speed, a ball doesn’t last a minute; the calorie friction it creates passing through the air burns the cover off.”
“Ya,” supplemented Shaeffer, the catcher, “und sometimes it sets my mitt afire.”
“Some speed!” agreed Lefty, as Jones, his head bent, reached the foot of the steps. “He looks tired.”
“He’s always that way after he tramps around a strange town,” said the owner of the Wind Jammers. “Afterward he usually goes to bed and rests, and he comes out to the games as full of fire and kinks as a boy who has stuffed himself with green apples. I’ll introduce you, Locke.”
The southpaw looked round again. Weegman was gone; probably he had vanished into the convenient door of the hotel. Cap’n Wiley drew Lefty forward to meet the voiceless pitcher, and, perceiving a stranger, Mysterious Jones halted at the top of the steps and stabbed him with a stare full in the face. Lefty had never looked into such searching, penetrating eyes.
Wiley made some deft and rapid movements with his hands and fingers, using the deaf-and-dumb language to make Jones aware of the identity of the famous Big League pitcher. Already the mute had lapsed into disappointed indifference, but he accepted Locke’s offered hand and smiled in a faint, melancholy way.
“He’s