no trickery—I seen it. After which the ballyhoo artist passes the hat. Get me?
* * * *
That beaner Pete Horton unhooks at Jack—well, it beans him! And bounds clean up into the press stand like it was shot there out of a gun! And Jack—that ball didn’t have no more effect on him than as if he had been struck by an idea—fact! He never even blinks! All he does is look surprised, then sore, and then—wade into the diamond swingin’ a long black bat and looking for Horton! Pete hadn’t hurt him—no, sir! Iron-Head Barry had nothin’ on Jack Adams! But he was insulted, see?
Well, Pete applies to the ump for protection, and gets it; and Jack—well, under the circumstances, instead of gettin’ the bench, Jack gets his base on a dead ball.
And they wasn’t never a deader ball!
Yeh—we win the game with the Pawnees; and how Jack Adams’s battin’ busted up the world seriousness is history.
And I guess that’s pretty near the finish—except a couple of morals—I ain’t no piker—an’ a letter.
As the feller says: most of us spends our life worryin’ about things that never happen—or can’t. And as the feller didn’t say: bone, like gold, is where you find it.
As for the letter, it’s one I sent to Mrs. Ameliar Jack Adams, about a month after we win the Big Series, along with a little trick automatic—a sort of weddin’ present.
“Dear madam,” I says, “the enclosed is strictly for home defense; but if you ever feel like usin’ it on Jack, why, go right ahead, and no jury wouldn’t never convict you—an’ shoot low!”
INFORM MR. SWEENEY, by Samuel G. Camp
Of course it’s old stuff now—that story about the rube who was looking ’em over at the zoo; and how, when he lamped the duck-footed Bazooka or something, he chirps: “There ain’t no such animal!”
Old stuff. It wouldn’t get you a laugh in Mugg’s Corners, Missouri, nowadays. But like a lot of other gags, and cold-storage eggs—it was good once.
And the reason why it was good was because, among other things, there was an idea behind it. Some people are so darned opinionated that they will refuse to recognize a certain fact, say, even after it has come up to the plate bigger than a barn door and beaned them between the eyes for a count of ten.
When a fellow gets that way there isn’t much you can do for him—he’s hopeless. And if it happens that a lot depends on your making one of these stand-patters see something that he refuses to see—well, you’re hopeless, too. You can take that from me.
So it was a lucky thing for me that Jim Riordan wasn’t that way. To be sure Jim took a lot of showing, or rather, he wouldn’t stand for any showing at all, which is worse yet. But when finally a certain fact loomed up in front of Jim about the size of the R-34 airship—Jim saw it.
And so, having reached the end of the story, maybe it would be a good plan to begin it.
My home town is a little place up in Massachusetts—in the Berkshires. If I told you the name of the place it wouldn’t make any difference. You never heard of it. You never will hear of it.
There are three places where you can find the name of the place in print; and if you live to be three thousand years old you will never find in that way anywhere else. These places are as follows: on the map, if it happens to be the kind of map that clutters itself all up with little things like that; in the local newspaper, published every Thursday or Friday without fail; and in the Annual Baseball Guide—because I was born there. You understand I’m not trying to pull any ballyhoo stuff for myself. I’m just telling you.
So when the bunch got in on the world’s series dough that fall, and so everything was Jake with me until next spring—I had plenty to live on over the winter, and being a single man and all, I wasn’t doing any worrying about that old rainy day that is always taking the joy out of married life, if there is any—well, seeing things shaped up like that, I sort of did a little thinking. I’ll give you one guess as to what I was thinking about.
Right. And I made up my mind that maybe one winter in a regular place wouldn’t do me any harm.
You see, I’m a small-town fellow, and—well, of course a ball-player travels round a lot, but you don’t really see much. Most of the time you are either going some place or else going away from it; and what with all the time worrying about why you aren’t getting that old base-hit, or why your fast one isn’t breaking right, or something—what with all that and that, and generally being in a hurry, you look at a lot of things without really seeing ’em. If you get what I’m driving at.
So I thought a few months in an honest- to-goodness big town might do me a little good. I’d mingle with the bunch, and go to places, and all that; and—well, you see what I mean. And no doubt it would be a sort of education, in a way.
But don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t thinking of hitting any of those old high places. I was too old a bird for that. There’s nothing in it. I signed up at a boarding-house that was advertised as highly respectable, and was: and I even went and got me a job because I couldn’t quite see five months of steady loafing. It would get to be monotonous.
I’ll admit that it was a cinch job: easy work, short hours, and—it paid enough to keep me in cigarette money, anyway, that’s the way it is. If I had been down on my uppers and really needed that job the worst way—do you see me getting it? I’ll say you don’t.
Well, things went along for a couple of months or so without anything much happening. In the mean time I had got pretty well acquainted with a fellow by the name of Johnny Harris that worked where I did. Of coarse Johnny had his faults—I’m coming to one of ’em—like all of us; but taking him all round he was a pretty fair sort of soul.
As to that fault of Johnny’s, they say everybody goes crazy in a different way, and Johnny—he was cracked wide open on the subject of dancing. Outside of that Johnny was a good deal the same as anybody else.
Every morning Johnny woke up with one of those crazy jazz things running through his head, and all day long he stepped round in time to it. It was a good thing for Johnny that he wasn’t stuck on slow waltzes. If he had been he’d have lost his job. He wouldn’t ever have got anywhere—and Johnny had considerable running round to do. Anyway, Johnny Harris would shadow-dance like that, as you might say, all day; and then, come night, every night, he would go to a real dance—and he never missed a single number, take it from Johnny.
It strikes me that Johnny Harris picked out a mighty poor way to go crazy. If it was me I’d pick something that called for a little less exertion.
Well, one day Johnny asked me to come on and be a sport and go to a dance with him. He said he had a couple of tickets for the annual masquerade ball of some fraternal order or other—the B. V. D.’s or something—and believe him, it was going to be a swell affair, and the best jazz band in town, bar none.
Some music! According to Johnny, this was going to be one of the greatest little occasions ever, and anybody would certainly be a sap to miss it. And here I could have a ticket merely for the asking—why, I didn’t have to ask for it, he was offering it to me. And take it from him, it was no cinch to get them—these tickets; the only way he got his was because he happened to stand in with the management.
“Where did you get the idea that I was one of these
