The excitement in the stands was intense. Henrietta led cheer after cheer, and turned so many somersaults that she became quite dizzy and had to be led back to a seat. Hannibal was the next batter up. He singled, and then Oscar came up and drove one right into the shortstop’s hands for a double play. But Mars was still in the lead.
Smith slammed down his glove and came in, followed by the rest of the team, who crowded about Mr. Kurtz. The pitcher was furious.
“You get those midgets out of there,” he shouted, “or I quit! I can’t pitch to midgets.”
“Oh, come,” said Mr. Kurtz. “You’ve been over to watch ’em practice. You knew what size they were.”
“Sure I did,” the pitcher retorted, “but I didn’t know they’d just stand there waiting for me to walk ’em.”
“They’re not obliged to try to get hits off you,” said the manager.
“Look,” said Smith, “you know what you’re askin’ me to do? You’re askin’ me to stand sixty feet from a target the size of the hole in a stovepipe and put a ball through it three times out of six. Because if they won’t strike at anything, that’s what I have to do. And there ain’t any pitcher can do it.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Mr. Kurtz sarcastically, “I notice you talked big enough about what you could do when I hired you. Well, you signed up with me, and win or lose, you’re going to pitch these two games—understand?”
He would have said more, but Mr. Bean pushed his way through the knot of players, followed by Mr. Arquebus. “What we got here,” he demanded, “a ball game or a debatin’ society? Get your boys up there, Kurtz. Take a look up in the stands. Those folks’ll be down here on the field in a minute, and if they do come down—”
“What we got here, a ball game or a debatin’ society?”
“Get them so-called ball players of yourn up to the plate, Kurtz, dad rat ye,” Freddy shouted. “Ye can’t play baseball with your mouth.”
“Oh, is that so?” Kurtz replied. “You played a trick on us, Arquebus. Ain’t any pitcher can pitch strikes to a bunch of little spiders.”
“Mebbe that’s so and mebbe it ain’t,” said Freddy. “You thought you was playin’ a trick on us, didn’t you, concealin’ the fact that three at least of your team are well-known players, playin’ under assumed names? What’s more, you knew these Martian boys were small, but you figured that it didn’t matter, as long as they swung at everything.”
“But they don’t ever swing! They don’t try to hit!” Kurtz protested almost tearfully.
“Ain’t any law says they have to, is there?” Freddy demanded.
The stands were getting impatient. “Come on, Tushville; play ball!” they yelled. Even the Tushville rooters joined in the angry protests.
Mr. Anderson had appeared from somewhere. He took Mr. Kurtz’s arm. “Look, Kurtz,” he said, “be a sport. You don’t want to lose the game by default, do you? He bent and muttered something in the manager’s ear. Freddy edged closer, trying to hear, but Anderson, bringing his arm up sharply as if to scratch his head, caught the pig a sharp blow under the chin with his elbow.
“Consarn ye, ye clumsy gowk!” Freddy exclaimed. He didn’t forget, even with the surprise and pain of the blow, that he was Mr. Arquebus.
Anderson whirled on him. He appeared suddenly to have lost his temper completely. “You dirty thief!” he said under his breath, and pulled back his arm to punch the whiskered face.
Freddy got set to duck, but stood his ground. “Go ahead,” he said. “Want me to tell everybody about what I got out of your safe?”
“Shut up, you fool!” Anderson whispered. And dropped his arm.
“I can talk or I can shut up,” said Freddy. “It’s all accordin’. Maybe you’d like to talk to me, instead of me talkin’ to the cops. Maybe—”
Freddy had been aware for a minute or two of some large person pushing toward him through the crowd of excited players. Now he felt a huge hand resting lightly on his shoulder, and the heavy voice of Mr. Hercules said: “Muster Arquebus, thus guntlemun a botherin’ yuh?”
“Well, he’s a spectator, Here,” Freddy said. “He ain’t any business down here on the field. Maybe you’d escort him back to his seat.”
So Mr. Hercules took hold of Mr. Anderson’s collar with one hand and the slack of his pants with the other, and carried him, squirming and kicking, back into the grandstand and plunked him down in his seat.
When Freddy turned his attention again to Mr. Kurtz and his team, he found that they were dispersing. Smith had gone grumbling back to the bench, and Swiggett had stepped up to the plate and was waiting for the pitch.
In the fifth inning, Swiggett fouled out, Ernie Popp hit one over the fence for a home run, Jaybob singled, then he and Cranbury were put out on a double play. This evened the score. But the Martians came up in the same order as they had in the fourth. Mr. Boomschmidt struck out, but the four Martians again refused to try for anything that Smith could throw them, and again offered such small targets that he could not strike them out. One after the other they took their base on balls. Chirp-squeak was forced in, and the bases were loaded with Martians. By that time Smith was so nervous that he couldn’t throw a strike even to Mr. Hercules, who was the next one up. The strong man hit a two bagger, Leo popped out, and Hannibal bunted and was put out, but not until the last of the Martians and Mr. Hercules had crossed the plate. And the score stood at Tushville 6, Martians 11.
The sixth was even worse for Tushville. Oigle singled, Brown struck out, and Agglett hit a fly to center field which Chirp caught easily. With two out, Black Beard evidently felt that he didn’t have much chance. He swung half-heartedly at the first two pitches, waited out two wide ones, then hit a grounder straight into Oscar’s huge claw. The ostrich swung back his foot so slowly that Freddy thought the man would reach first before the ball did. But Oscar was slow because he was taking careful aim. The claw swept forward and the ball went straight and true into Two-clicks’ glove, so fast that it nearly knocked the Martian over. And a full second before Black Beard’s toe touched first.
It was when the Martian team was coming in to bat that Mr. Hercules came over to where Freddy was sitting on the bench. “Mr. Arquebus,” he said. “ ’Tain’t none of my business, but that there Underson, he’s down here again. Want I should put um back in hus seat?”
Freddy looked across to where Two-clicks had been stopped by Mr. Anderson as he was coming in from first. As he watched, they exchanged a few words, then the Martian nodded as if agreeing, and Anderson went back to the stand.
“He seems to have gone back, Here,” Freddy said. “But you might keep an eye on him.”
He had forgotten to talk the way Mr. Arquebus was supposed to talk, and Mr. Hercules gave him a puzzled look. “Yuh remind me o’ somebody, Mr. Arquebus,” he said. “’S funny. Mus’ be somebody Uh know, mustn’t it? Don’ seem’s’ough Uh could be reminded of somebody Uh ain’t uhquainted with, could Uh? Mebbe Uh could though, huh? Lumme see—who don’t Uh know?”
Freddy left the strong man to the rather hopeless task of going over in his mind all the people he didn’t know, and turned back to the game. Oscar had singled and was running for second. Mr. Boomschmidt was running toward first, but before he reached it, the ball, which he had driven straight into the second baseman’s glove, was fielded to Black Beard. Then Chirp-squeak came to bat, and to Freddy’s amazement, he swung at the first ball and missed.
Freddy at once began scratching his left ear, which was the signal for the Martians not to swing at anything. But Chirp-squeak paid no attention. He swung twice more, and was out.
Then Chirp came up. Freddy clawed frantically at his ear, but it was no good: Chirp also struck out.
Freddy stumbled out, holding his glasses up from his nose so that he could see under them, and stopped Two-clicks as he started out toward first. He demanded to know what they meant by disregarding his signals.
He understood Two-clicks to say that the Martians wanted to play the
game like regular players, not just stand up at the plate and watch the pitches whiz by.
“But you are playing,” he protested. “The point of the game is to get runs, not to swing at something you can’t hit. And you’ve been getting runs; you’ve seen how it works.”
But Two-clicks was not convinced. And they were holding the game up. Freddy had to let him go.
The rest of the game was a disaster. Mr. Boomschmidt and Freddy argued and argued with the Martians. But it did no good. Tushville got two runs in the seventh, but Click-two-squeaks and Two-clicks struck out, and Mr. Hercules, who followed them, was out when Jaybob caught a fly that he knocked into center field. In the eighth, Tushville got four runs—owing mainly to the fact that Two-clicks and Click-two-squeaks fumbled every ball that was thrown to them. They not only fumbled them; they fell on them and couldn’t find them, and when they found them, they made ridiculously wild throws. And Chirp-squeaks’ pitching became just tossing the ball over the plate, so that the Tushville players almost knocked him out of the box. At the beginning of the ninth, with the score at 12—11 in favor of Tushville, Freddy took Chirp-squeak out and sent Mr. Hercules in to pitch. He sent a young alligator named Roger to take the strong man’s place at right field. Roger was no good in the outfield, but he had shown some skill at batting, which he did with his tail.
But all this was too late to save the game. Tushville won, 13—11.
CHAPTER
16
Freddy was so discouraged at the defeat of the Martian team that when he got back to Centerboro, instead of going out to the farm, he sneaked away from his friends and went up into the room he had rented at Mrs. Peppercorn’s and sat down in a rocking chair by the window. He didn’t even take off his hat or his whiskers. He just sat there.
He had tried hard to be a good coach. He hadn’t known much about baseball when he started, but he had read all the books he could find in the Centerboro Library on the subject, and had talked to the Centerboro High coach. And he did know a lot about team spirit—which is the thing that makes a group of nine players a team, not just a crowd. He felt that he had done a good job, too. The team had played well together. Until the Martians had quit.
There was a rap on the door and Mrs. Peppercorn put her head in. “What are you doing, sitting here all by yourself in the dark with your hat on?” she demanded.
Freddy said: “It isn’t dark.”
“Well, you look as if it ought to be,” she said. “My land, don’t you know that poem by Longfellow:
The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night
As a brick comes hurtling downward
From a rooftop, in a fight.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right,” Freddy said.
“I changed it,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “I’m rewriting Longfellow’s poems. He was a good poet all right, but he’s kind of old-fashioned. I want to put some snap into him. In this one I change the meaning, but keep the same sound of the words. I haven’t finished yet, but I’ve fixed up a couple of stanzas. Sort of repaired ’em where they’re old and worn out. It’s about mosquitoes.” And she recited:
“I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a strange foreboding comes o’er me
That makes me scratch my wrist.
A feeling of doubt and discomfort
That I cannot quite restrain,
And resembles terror only
As an itch resembles a pain.
For the dark will be filled with the music
Of the gnats that infest the night
Till they fold their wings on my forehead
And silently start to bite.”
Freddy was glad he had his hat and whiskers on so that Mrs. Peppercorn couldn’t see his expression. But he said: “Excellent! Very good! I have only one criticism. The last lines could come closer to the original, which I believe are ‘Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, And silently steal away.’ Let me see. Forehead … Arabs—Ah, I have it. ‘Till they fold their wings on my spareribs, and silently start to bite.’”
Mrs. Peppercorn gave a cackle of laughter. “Spar’ibs and Arabs, eh? That’s good. Why don’t we work together on some of these poems? The one about the village blacksmith, for instance. And by the way, why did Longfellow call him ‘Smithy,’ do you suppose?”
“Did he?” Freddy asked.
“Of course. ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree the village Smithy stands.’”
“Oh,” said Freddy, “‘smithy’ is just the old-fashioned name for blacksmith’s shop.”
“And there aren’t any chestnut trees any more,” Mrs. Peppercorn went on. “I shortened it some—like this:
Under the spreading maple tree
The blacksmith shoppe stands.
The Smith, a mighty man is he
With hands like iron hams;
And the muscles on his brawny arms
Are big as Superman’s.
Don’t you like that better?”
Freddy didn’t have to answer, for just then the doorbell rang. It was Mr. Boomschmidt. Mrs. Peppercorn brought him upstairs, and as soon as he was inside the door he said: “Freddy, I bet you’re going to be awful mad at me. I’ve done something foolish. Oh, my goodness, how mad you’re going to be!”
“Well, I can’t be mad unless you give me a chance to,” Freddy said.
“Am I going to be mad too?” Mrs. Peppercorn asked. “Because if so, I’ll stay. I haven’t been mad at anybody in a week.”
“I expect you will, ma’am; I expect you will,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Not that what I did will injure you personally, but it will injure my friend Freddy, here, and since you are a friend of Freddy’s, and also, I hope, of mine, I presume it will injure you—that is, presupposing your interest in our joint venture in the baseball field, it will—”
“Well, suppose you stop talking and let us judge,” Mrs. Peppercorn interrupted. “What have you done?”
Mr. Boomschmidt said: “Yes, I suppose I might as well get down to it. You know, Freddy, at the end of the fifth inning Kurtz said to me: ‘Looks like you got you a good team, mister.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I wish now I’d agreed when you suggested that the winning team take all of the gate receipts, instead of just two thirds.’”
“‘I guess you’d have had about a thousand dollars in your pocket,’ Kurtz said. ‘Understand that’s about what we’ve taken in.’
“Then he looked at me hard a minute, and he said: ‘Tell you what, Boomschmidt,’ he said. ‘I’m a sport. I’ll agree to those terms for the second game. Winner to take all. How about it?’
“‘Why, that hardly seems fair,’ I said. ‘Looks as if we had this game sewed up now, and my goodness,’ I said, ‘if we do as well next time you wouldn’t get anything.’
“Well, he got kind of unpleasant about it then. Of course if I was scared, he said, we’d let it ride. ‘Didn’t think you were so timid, Boom,’ he said.
“I said, ‘I don’t like betting on a sure thing, that’s all.’
“But he kept on like that, and finally I said: ‘All right, Kurtz. If you want to throw money away, I won’t stop you, as long as you’re throwing it into my pocket.’
“So he wrote on a piece of paper that he agreed that in the second Mars-Tushville game, the winner should get all the gate receipts. I wrote one too, and signed it. Here’s his paper, Freddy. And—oh, my gracious, now it looks as if Tushville was going to win both games.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Freddy. And he tried to console Mr. Boomschmidt. Their third of the first game would pay all the expenses of both. If Tushville got a thousand dollars from the second one—well, the Martian team hadn’t lost any money. “It just means that the team will have to go without uniforms a while longer.”
“I know,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “But when we go on the road and get games with other teams, our team will look funny without uniforms.”
“So will they look funny with uniforms,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Land sakes, you dress up those spider boys in caps and pants, and shirts with four sleeves—and how you going to get that elephant into a uniform? Why, it’ll take fifty yards of cloth.”
How will you get that elephant into a uniform?
“When was it that Kurtz made you that proposition?” Freddy asked. “Wasn’t it just after Anderson came down out of the grandstand to talk to him?”
“I think so. At the end of the fifth.”
“I know what happened,” Freddy said. “Anderson has got Squeak-squeak locked up somewhere. And he can make the Martians do anything he wants them to do. They don’t dare refuse, because if they do, he might kill Squeak-squeak. I saw him talking to Two-clicks. I’ll bet anything that what he said was: ‘If you boys ever want to see Squeak-squeak alive again, you do as I say—you swing at every ball that is pitched to you.’”
“I believe you’re right, Freddy,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Oh, my goodness gracious, what a deep-dyed wretch that Anderson is! I suppose he told Kurtz that he could pay the Martians to throw the game. What can we do, Freddy?”
“What I can’t understand,” Freddy said, “is how he would dare to make such a proposition to Kurtz, who for all he knows is an honest man. He must know Kurtz. Must know he’s a crook. Hey, wait a minute! Mr. Boom, let me see how Kurtz signed that paper he gave you.”
Mr. Boomschmidt took it from his pocket. “Here it is. J. H. Kurtz. Why, Freddy?”
“Because Anderson turned Squeak-squeak over to someone he called ‘Herb.’ At least, we’re pretty sure he did. Do you suppose that H could possibly stand for Herbert? Golly, why did I just look in Centerboro for Herbs? Tushville never occurred to me.”
They hurried downstairs to look in the phone book. “J. H. Kurtz,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “That’s all it says. Tushville 237. Well, let’s find out.” And he gave the operator the number.
Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars Page 10