rd to hit safely. Lane knew that as well as any hitter in the
world, so he let two of the curves go by--two strikes. Again the Rube
relentlessly gave him the same ball; and Lane, hitting viciously,
spitefully, because he did not want to hit that kind of a ball, sent up
a fly that Rand easily captured.

"Oh, I don't know! Pretty fair, I guess!" yelled a tenor-voiced fan;
and he struck the key-note. And the bleachers rose to their feet and
gave the Rube the rousing cheer of the brotherhood of fans.

Hoffer walked to first on a base on balls. Sweeney advanced him. The
Rube sent up a giant fly to Callopy. Then Staats hit safely, scoring
the first run of the game. Hoffer crossed the plate amid vociferous
applause. Mitchell ended the inning with a fly to Blandy.

What a change had come over the spirit of that Quaker aggregation! It
was something to make a man thrill with admiration and, if he happened
to favor Chicago, to fire all his fighting blood. The players poured
upon the Rube a continuous stream of scathing abuse. They would have
made a raging devil of a mild-mannered clergyman. Some of them were
skilled in caustic wit, most of them were possessed of forked tongues;
and Cogswell, he of a thousand baseball battles, had a genius for
inflaming anyone he tormented. This was mostly beyond the ken of the
audience, and behind the back of the umpire, but it was perfectly plain
to me. The Quakers were trying to rattle the Rube, a trick of the game
as fair for one side as for the other. I sat there tight in my seat,
grimly glorying in the way the Rube refused to be disturbed. But the
lion in him was rampant. Fortunately, it was his strange gift to pitch
better the angrier he got; and the more the Quakers flayed him, the
more he let himself out to their crushing humiliation.

The innings swiftly passed to the eighth with Chicago failing to score
again, with Philadelphia failing to score at all. One scratch hit and
a single, gifts to the weak end of the batting list, were all the lank
pitcher allowed them. Long since the bleachers had crowned the Rube.
He was theirs and they were his; and their voices had the peculiar
strangled hoarseness due to over-exertion. The grand stand, slower to
understand and approve, arrived later; but it got there about the
seventh, and ladies' gloves and men's hats were sacrificed.

In the eighth the Quakers reluctantly yielded their meed of praise,
showing it by a cessation of thei