grin!' Don't forget what your brother told you! That's all, you dear old
chump!"

So Roy grinned. Perhaps he grinned so much that he quite disordered his
features, for he found Rollins looking at him curiously as though
wondering as to his sanity. But Roy still grinned--and watched.

Rollins wound himself up and unwound himself, and the ball shot forward.
Roy judged it quickly and let it go by. The umpire vindicated his
judgment.

"Ball!" he said.

Then came something of a different calibre and Roy stepped down and hit
at it. It went by without a jar.

"Strike!" said the umpire.

Again Roy tried his luck, spun half around and recovered himself to find
Rollins doing the grinning. Roy grew angry. To have Rollins laugh at him
was too much. He gripped his bat and took position again. Then he
remembered his grin. It was hard to get it back, but he did it. Roy has
an idea that that grin worried Rollins; that as may be, it is a fact
that the next ball went so wide of the plate that the catcher had to
throw himself on the ground to stop it and Kirby was safe on second.

"Two and two!" cried the catcher, setting his mask firm again. "Right
after him, Jim. He's pretty easy."

Jim undoubtedly meant Roy to strike at the next one, but Roy didn't
because the ball quite evidently had no intention of coming over the
base.

"Three balls," remarked the umpire in a disinterested tone, just as
though hundreds of hearts weren't up in hundreds of throats.

For the first time since coming to bat Roy had a gleam of hope. Rollins
had put himself in a hole and the next ball would have to be a good one.
And it was.

Roy swung sharply to meet it, dropped his bat like a hot potato and
streaked for first. Out in left field a cherry and black stockinged
youth was gazing inquiringly toward the afternoon sky. Home raced Kirby,
around the bases streaked Roy. He had seen the ball now and hope was
dying out within him. Left fielder seemed directly under it. But he
would run as hard as he knew how, at any rate; there was no harm in
that; and you never could tell what would happen in baseball. So Roy
went flying across second base and headed for third like a small cyclone
in a hurry. And as he did so his heart leaped, for left fielder had
suddenly turned and was running sideways and backward by turns out into
the field.

He had misjudged it badly. Had he not done so I should have had a
different ending to narrate. But he did, and when the b