to baseball
and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me
presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee
from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season's pennant
race "dope" to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this
or that big-leaguer's stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but
when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is
far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the
face over such esoterics (or "inside stuff," to put it in "Fanese") as
how and when a "squeeze" ought to be pulled off, I showed them the
bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand--which there
is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many
seasons on the diamond--and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat
was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an
empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repetition of what came near
happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could
never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns,
punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing
mechanism.

They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them
that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange
(this, of course, because the incomparable "Big Bill" was at his zenith
long before their time); but they were duly respectful when I said I
had played three years' Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential
when I assured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the
North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who
had been a bush-league twirler before his "wing went glass," as he put
it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with
a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in
reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of
using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival
of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down
the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in the _Moonflower_, the
man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before,
and one of them--he had some sort of decoration for his part in the
show--spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This
latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that