if they's enough ink in this or not," he answers, handin'
me a fountain pen. "Write it on the back of this card."

When the crowd sees Hector strollin' out to the box, they give him his
usual reception, which was the same as the Kaiser would have got if
he'd walked down Broadway along in April, 1917. The first guy up for
St. Looey hit a roller through the box and Hector stood on his left
shoulder tryin' to pick it up. The runner only got as far as second
before Hector arose. The next guy put a neat round hole in the right
field fence, makin' it two runs. Well, before it was three out they
had got four more and the only guy connected with the St. Looey team
that didn't get a hit was the owner. They only quit slammin' the pill
because they had batted themselves sick and could no longer stagger up
to the plate.

Hector comes to bat in the next innin' with the bases as full as a
miner on pay night. He lets two go by, right in the slot, and he fell
down skinnin' his nose, swingin' at the next for the third and last
strike.

I removed him by hand and sent in a ball player to pitch the rest of
the game.

"Well, Alex," I says on the way home, "what do you think of your
patient?"

"Is he as bad as that every day?" he asks me.

"No," I says. "He was Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson to-day, alongside of
what he usually is!"

"Hmmph!" grunts Alex. "I can see he ain't a ball player, anyway."

"You been readin' 'Sherlock Holmes,'" I says.

"Baseball ain't everything!" declares Alex, rubbin' his nose. "And the
point we have to consider is--what _can_ he do?"

"That's easy!" I says. "How much is seven from seven?"

"Why--nothin'," says Alex.

"That's Hector!" I says.

With that I told him Hector's pedigree from the time he crossed my path
when an infant, to date. I left out nothin' and laid it on good and
thick. I explained how Hector had been the world's most consistent
failure from the time he had been introduced as "It's a boy!" up to the
time of writin' and when I got all through, Alex grins like a wolf.

"A most promisin' case!" he says. "This here's somethin' that's gonna
put me on my mettle, right at the start. The tougher a thing looks,
the more appetizin' it strikes me! Now I'll take it for granted that
this man's got no _strong_ points. All right--that's nothin' but a
detail! You've told me a lot of hard things about him, but you ain't
said he ain't human--and if he's human he's got a _weakness_!