His Own Stuff

Charles E. Van Loan

It’s a mighty fine thing for a man to know when he’s had enough, but there’s a piece of knowledge which beats it all hollow.

That’s for him to know when his friends have had too much.

This is no temperance sermon, so you needn’t quit reading. It’s the story of a baseball player who thought he was funny and didn’t know when to quit the rough-and-tumble comedy that some idiot has named practical joking.

Before I tell you what happened to Tom O’Connor because he didn’t know when to quit being funny, I want to put myself on record. I don’t believe that there is any such a thing as a practical joke. As I understand the word, a thing in order to be practical must have some sense to it and be of some use to people. To play it safe I looked up in the dictionary definition of the word to see if I could stretch it far enough to cover the sort of stuff that Tom O’Connor pulled on us at the training camp last season. I couldn’t make it answer. Here’s what I found in the dictionary:

 

“Practical—pertaining to or governed by actual use or experience, as contrasted with ideals, speculations and theories.”

 

That’s what the big book says it means, and I string with the definition whether I understand all of it or not. Show me anything in there that applies to sawing out half the slats in a man’s bed or mixing up all the shoes in a Pullman car at three o’clock in the morning!

You can call it practical joking if you want to, but it won’t go with me. I claim there’s nothing practical about it, or sensible either. Practical joking is just another name for plain, ordinary foolishness with a mean streak in it. The main thing about a practical joke is that somebody always gets hurt—usually an innocent party.

I’m strong for a good clever joke. I get as much fun out of one as anybody and I can laugh when the joke is on me; but when it comes to the rough stuff I pass.

Take ’em as a whole, baseball players are a jolly bunch. They’ve got youth and health and vitality. They call us the Old Guard, but we’re really nothing but a lot of young fellows and we have the reputation of being the liveliest outfit in the league; but even so, we got sick of the sort of stunts that Tom O’Connor handed us at the training camp and in the early part of the season.

We didn’t have much of a line on Tom when he joined the club. He’d been in the big league only part of the season previously, and he came to the Old Guard as the result of a winter trade. We needed a first-baseman the worst way, and Uncle Billy—he’s our manager—gave up a pitcher, an infielder and an outfielder to get Tom O’Connor away from the Blues. The newspapers made an awful roar about that trade, and so did the fans. They said Uncle Billy was out of his head and was trying to wreck the team by letting three good men go. The noise they made wasn’t a whisper to the howl that went up from the other manager when the time came to get some work out of those three good men.

When it comes to a swap, Uncle Billy is a tougher proposition than a Connecticut Yank, and a Connecticut Yank can take an Armenian pawnbroker’s false teeth away from him and give him Brazil nuts in exchange for ’em. Uncle Billy always hands the other managers three or four men for one. He’s so liberal and open-hearted that they feel sorry for him, and they keep right on feeling sorry after they see what he’s slipped them in the trade.

In this case the pitcher had a strained ligament that even the bone-setter couldn’t fix, the infielder’s eyes were giving out on him and the outfielder had a permanent charley-horse in his left leg. As big-league ballplayers they were all through, but as bench-warmers and salary grabbers they were immense.

Even if they had been in condition I think that Tom O’Connor would have been worth the three, for he is a cracking good first-baseman, and now that he has settled down to business and quit being the team comedian he’ll be even better than he was last year.

He joined us at the spring training camp in Louisiana. We’ve been going to the same place for years. It’s a sort of health resort with rotten water to drink and baths; and the hotel is always full of broken-down old men with whiskers and fat wives to look after ’em.

O’Connor turned up in the main dining-room the first night with a big box of marshmallows in his hand. He is a tall, handsome chap with a tremendous head of hair and a smile that sort of warms you to him even after you know him. He stopped at every table and invited folks to help themselves.

“These are very choice, madam; something new in confectionery. Prepared by a friend of mine. Won’t you try one?”

That was his spiel, but the smile and the little twinkle of the eye that went with it was what did the business. The fat ladies didn’t stop to think that it was rather unusual for a strange young man to be offering them candy. They smiled back at Tom and helped themselves to the marshmallows, and some of them insisted that their husbands should try one too.

Tom was a smooth, rapid worker and he kept moving, not stopping long at a table and never looking back. Perhaps that was just as well, for the marshmallow had been dipped in powdered quinine instead of powdered sugar. Quinine ain’t so bad when you expect it, but when your mouth is all fixed for marshmallow the disappointment and the quinine together make a strong combination. The fat ladies went out of the dining-room on the run, choking into their handkerchiefs, and the old men sent C. Q. D.s for the proprietor. He came in and Tom met him at the door and handed him one of the marshmallows, and then of course everybody laughed.

I admit that we might have begun discouraging his comedy right there. We would have done it if he’d been a minor-leaguer trying to break in, but he wasn’t. He’d been five months with the Blues—a bad ball club, but still in the big league. That made him one of us. We knew and he knew that he was going to be our first-baseman and he settled down with as much assurance as if he had been with us ten years instead of ten hours.

He saw right away that we were going to be a good audience for him. Not all of his stuff was on the rough-house order. Some of us were not long in finding that out.

A couple of nights afterward we were having a nice, quiet little game of draw poker in my room on the third floor of the hotel. Any poker game running after ten o’clock in the same hotel with Uncle Billy has got to be a quiet one—or it’s a case of a fifty-dollar fine all round.

Uncle Billy is a great baseball manager but he’s awfully narrow-gauge on certain subjects, and one of ’em is the American indoor national pastime of draw poker. He doesn’t like the game for seven hundred different reasons, but mainly because he says it sets a bad example to the kid players, who get to gambling among themselves and lose more than they can afford. That’s true of course, but if a kid is born with the gambling bug in his system you can’t fine it out of him, not even at fifty a smash. One season Uncle Billy tried to shut down on poker altogether, and there was more poker played that year than ever before. Then he took off the lid, and now we’re allowed to play twenty-five-cent limit until ten o’clock at night. Think of it! Why, if a man had all the luck in the world and filled everything he drew to he might win as much as four dollars!

I’m not saying that the rule isn’t a good one for recruits and kids, but it comes hard on the veterans, especially at the training camp where there isn’t a thing to do after dark. We used to sneak a real game once in a while with a blanket over the transom and paper stuffed in the cracks and the keyhole. We had to do that because we couldn’t trust Uncle Billy. He was just underhanded enough to listen outside of door, and to make it worse the poor old coot has insomnia and we never know when he’s asleep and when he’s not.

Well, this poker party in my room was the real thing: Pat Dunphy, Holliday, Satterfield, Meadows, Daly and myself—all deep-sea pirates. It was table-stakes of course, every man declaring fifty or a hundred behind his stack in case he should pick up something heavy and want action on it.

It got to be about two in the morning, and Dunphy was yawning his head off and looking at his watch every few minutes. He was two hundred ahead. The rest of us were up and down, seesawing along and waiting for a set of fours or something. The elevators had quit running long ago and there wasn’t a sound in the hotel anywhere. What talking we did was in whispers because we never knew when Uncle Billy might take it into his head to go for a walk. I’ve known him to bust up a poker game at four in the morning.

Dunphy was just scooping in another nice pot—like a fool I played my pat straight against his one-card draw—when all of a sudden a board creaked in the hall outside, and then came a dry, raspy little cough that we knew mighty well.

“Holy Moses!” whispered Dunphy. “Uncle Billy! Don’t move!”

Then somebody pounded on the door. We were sure there wasn’t any light showing through the cracks, so we sat quiet a few seconds trying to think what to do. The pounding began again, louder than before—bangety bang-bang!

Well, our only chance was to keep Uncle Billy out of the room, so I motioned to the boys and they picked up their money and chips and tiptoed into the alcove in the corner. I whipped off my shirt, kicked off my pants, put on a bathrobe, tousled up my hair to make it look as if I’d been asleep a week, switched out the light and opened the door a few inches. Then I stepped out into the hall.

It was empty from end to end. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

We had a long discussion about it. We all agreed that it was Uncle Billy’s cough we heard; but why had he hammered on the door so hard and then gone away? That wasn’t like him. Had he been round to the other rooms checking up on us? Was he so sure of us that he didn’t need the actual evidence? Perhaps he was going to switch his system and begin fining people fifty dollars apiece on circumstantial evidence. It began to have all the earmarks of an expensive evening for the six of us.

“Did anybody else know about this party?” I asked.

“O’Connor knew,” Holliday spoke up. “I asked him if he didn’t want to play a little poker. He said he couldn’t take a chance of getting in Dutch with the boss so soon. That was his excuse, but maybe he was a little light in the vest pocket. He already knew about the ten o’clock rule and the fifty-dollar fine.”

“Did he know we were going to play in this room?”

“Sure, but I don’t see where you figure him. He wouldn’t have tipped it off to anybody. Probably Uncle Billy couldn’t sleep and was prowling round. You can’t get away from that cough. And he’s got us dead to rights or he wouldn’t have gone away. I’ll bet he’s had a pass-key and been in every one of our rooms. We’ll hear from him in the morning.

It did look that way. We settled up and the boys slipped out one at a time, carrying their shoes in their hands. I don’t know about the rest of ’em, but I didn’t sleep much. The fifty-dollar fine didn’t bother me, but Uncle Billy has got a way of throwing in a roast along with it.

I dreaded to go down to breakfast in the morning. Uncle Billy usually has a table with his wife and kids close to the door, so he can give us the once-over as we come in.

“Morning, Bob!” says Uncle Billy, smiling over his hotcakes. “How do you feel this morning?”

“Finer’n split silk!” says I, and went on over to the main table with the gang. That started me to wondering, because if Uncle Billy had anything on me he wouldn’t have smiled. The best I could have expected was a black look and a grunt. Uncle Billy was a poor hand at hiding his feelings. If he was peeved with you it showed in everything he did. I didn’t know what to make of that smile, and that’s what had me worried.

Dunphy and Holliday and the others were puzzled too, and the suspense was eating us up. We sat there, looking silly and fooling with our knives and forks, every little while stealing a peek at each other. We couldn’t figure it at all. Tom O’Connor was at one end of the table eating like a longshoreman and saying nothing. Dunphy stood the strain as long as he could and then he cracked.

“Did Uncle Billy call on any of you fellows last night?” said he.

“No! Was he sleep-walking again, the old rascal?”

“Was anything doing?”

“He never came near the fourth floor. If he had he’d ’a’ busted up a hot little crap game.”

“What was he looking for—poker?”

None of the boys had seen him. It was plain that if Uncle Billy had been night-prowling we were the only ones that he had bothered. Peachy Parsons spoke up.

“Did you see him, Pat?” says he.

“Why, no,” says Dunphy. “I—I heard him.”

For a few seconds there was dead silence. Then Tom O’Connor shoved his chair back, stood up, looked all round the table with a queer grin on his face and coughed once—that same dry, raspy little cough. It sounded so much like Uncle Billy that we all jumped.

O’Connor didn’t wait for the laugh. He walked out of the dining-room and left us looking at each other with our mouths open.

II

I knew a busher once who tore off a home run the first time he came to bat in the big league, and it would have been a lot better for him if he had struck out. The fans got to calling him Home-Run Slattery and he got to thinking he was all of that. He wouldn’t have a base on balls as a gift and he wouldn’t bunt. He wanted to knock the cover off every ball he saw. Uncle Billy shipped him back to Texas in June, and he’s there yet. In a way O’Connor reminded me of that busher.

He had made a great start as a comedian. The stuff that he put over on the poker players was clever and legitimate; there was real fun it in. His reputation as a two-handed kidder was established then and there, and he might have rested on it until he thought of something else as good. He might have; but we laughed at him, and then of course he wanted to put the next one over the fence too.

I can see now looking back at it, that we were partly responsible. You know how it is with a comedian—the more you laugh at him, the worse he gets. Pretty soon he wants laughs all the time, and if they’re not written into his part he tries to make ’em up as he goes along. If he hasn’t got any new, clever ideas he pulls old stuff or rough stuff—in other words he gets to be a slapstick comedian. A good hiss or two or a few rotten eggs at the right time would teach him to stay with legitimate work.

It didn’t take Tom long to run out of clever comedy and get down to the rough stuff. Rough stuff is the backbone of practical joking. Things began to happen round the training camp. We couldn’t actually prove ’em on Tom at the time—and we haven’t proved ’em on him yet—but the circumstantial evidence is all against him. He wouldn’t have a chance with a jury of his peers—whatever they are.

Tom began easy and worked up his speed by degrees. His first stunts were mild ones, such as leaving a lot of bogus calls with the night clerk and getting a lot of people rung out of bed at four in the morning; but of course that wasn’t funny enough to suit him.

There was a girl from Memphis stopping at the hotel, and Joe Holliday the pitcher thought pretty well of her. He borrowed an automobile one Sunday to take her for a ride. After they were about twenty miles from town the engine sneezed a few times and laid down cold.

“Don’t worry,” says Holliday, “I know all about automobiles. I’ll have this bird flying again in a minute.”

“It sounded to me as if you’d run out of gas,” said the girl who knew something about cars herself.

“Impossible!” says Holliday. “I had the tank filled this morning and you can see there’s no leak.”

“Well, I don’t know all about automobiles,” says the girl, “but you’d better take a look in that tank.”

That made Holliday a little sore, because he’d bought twenty gallons of gasoline and paid for it. They stayed there all day and Holliday messed round in the bowels of the beast and got full of oil and grease and dirt. I’ll bet he stored up enough profanity inside of him to last for the rest of his natural life. And all the time the girl kept fussing about the gasoline tank. Finally, after Joe had done everything else that he could think of, he unscrewed the cap and the gas tank was dry as a bone.

Somebody with a rare sense of humour had drawn off about seventeen gallons of gasoline.

“I told you so!” said the girl—which is just about what a girl would say under the circumstances.

They got back to the hotel late that night. Love’s young dream had run out with the gasoline, and from what I could gather they must have quarreled all the way home. Joe went down and got into a fight with the man at the garage and was hit over the head with a monkey-wrench. From now on you’ll notice that Tom’s comedy was mostly physical and people were getting hurt every time.

Joe’s troubles lasted O’Connor for a couple of days and then he hired a darky boy to get him a water snake. I think he wrote it in the boy’s contract that the snake had to be harmless or there was nothing doing. He put the snake, a whopping big striped one, between the sheets in Al Jorgenson’s bed, which is my notion of no place in the world to put a snake. Jorgenson is our club secretary—a middle-aged fellow who never has much to say and attends strictly to business.

Al rolled on to the snake in the dark, but it seems he knew what it was right away. He wrecked half the furniture, tore the door off the hinges and came fluttering down into the lobby, yelling murder at every jump. It was just his luck that the old ladies were all present. They were pulling off a whist tournament that night, but they don’t know yet who won. Al practically spoiled the whole evening for ’em.

The charitable way to look at it is that Tom didn’t know that Jorgenson was hitting the booze pretty hard and kept a quart bottle in his room. If he had known that, maybe he would have wished the snake on to a teetotaler, like Uncle Billy. To make it a little more abundant Tom slipped in and copped the snake while Al was doing his shirt-tail specialty, and when we got him back to the room there wasn’t any snake there. Tom circulated round among the old ladies and told ’em not to be alarmed in the least because maybe it wasn’t a real snake that Jorgenson saw.

But Tom had his good points after all. The next morning Al found the snake tied to his door-knob, which relieved his mind a whole lot; but he was so mortified and ashamed that he had all his meals in his room after that and used to come and go by the kitchen entrance.

Tom’s next stunt—which he didn’t make any secret of—put four of the kid recruits out of business. He framed up a midnight hunt for killyloo birds. It’s the old snipe trick. I didn’t believe that there were four people left in the world who would fall for that stunt. It was invented by one of old man Pharaoh’s boys in the days of the Nile Valley League. It is hard to find one man in the whole town who will fall for it, because it has been so well advertised, but Tom grabbed four in a bunch. It just goes to show how much solid ivory a baseball scout can dig up when his travelling expenses are paid.

The idea is very simple. First you catch a sucker and take him out in the woods at night. You give him a sack and a candle. He’s to keep the candle lighted and hold the mouth of the sack open so that you can drive the killyloo birds into it. The main point is to make it perfectly clear to the sucker that a killyloo bird when waked out of a sound sleep always walks straight to the nearest light to get his feet warm. After the sucker understands that thoroughly you can leave him and go home to bed. He sits there with his candle, fighting mosquitoes and wondering what has become of you and why the killyloo birds don’t show up.

Tom staged his production in fine style. He rented a livery rig and drove those poor kids eleven miles into a swamp. If you have ever seen a Louisiana swamp you can begin laughing now. He got ’em planted so far apart that they couldn’t do much talking, explained all about the peculiar habits of the sleepy killyloos, saw that their candles were burning nicely and then went away to herd in the game. He was back at the hotel by eleven o’clock.

About midnight the boys held a conference and decided that maybe it was a bad time of the year for killyloo birds but that the sucker crop hadn’t been cut down any. They started back for the hotel on foot and got lost in mud clear up to their necks. They stayed in the swamp all night and it’s a wonder that they got out alive. And that wasn’t all: Uncle Billy listened to their tales of woe and said if they didn’t have any more sense than that they wouldn’t make ballplayers, so he sent ’em home.

The night before we were to leave for the North there was a little informal dance at the hotel and the town folks came in to meet the ballplayers and learn the tango and the hesitation waltz.

It was a perfectly bully party and everything went along fine until the punch was brought in. We’d decided not to have any liquor in it on account of the strong prohibition sentiment in the community, so we had a kind of a fruit lemonade with grape juice in it.

Well, those fat old ladies crowded round the bowl as if they were perishing of thirst. They took one swig of the punch and went sailing for the elevators like full-rigged ships in a gale of wind.

Of course I thought I knew what was wrong. It’s always considered quite a joke to slip something into the punch. I’d been dancing with a swell little girl and as we started for the punch-bowl I said:

“You won’t mind if this punch has got a wee bit of a kick in it, will you?”

“Not in the least,” said she. “Father always puts a little brandy in ours.”

So that was all right and I ladled her out a sample. I would have got mine at the same time, but an old lady behind me started to choke and I turned round to see what was the matter. When I turned back to the girl again there were tears in her eyes and she was sputtering about rowdy ballplayers. She said that she had a brother at college who could lick all the big-leaguers in the world, and she hoped he’d begin on me. Then she went out of the room with her nose in the air.

I was terribly upset about it because I couldn’t think what I had done that was wrong, and just because I had the glass in my hand I began drinking the punch. Then I went out and climbed a telegraph pole and yelled for the fire department. Talk about going crazy with the heat. It can be done, believe me! I felt like a general-alarm fire for the rest of the evening.

There was an awful fuss about that, and some of us held a council of war. We decided to put it up to O’Connor. He stood pat in a very dignified way and said that he must positively refuse to take the blame for anything unless there was proof that he did it. About that time the cook found two empty tabasco-sauce bottles under the kitchen sink. That didn’t prove anything. We already knew what the stuff was and that too much of it had been used. One bottle would have been a great plenty.

That was the situation when we started North. Everybody felt that it was dangerous to be safe with a physical humourist like O’Connor on the payroll. We hoped that he’d quit playing horse and begin to play ball.

We went so far as to hint that the next rough stuff he put over on the bunch would bring him before the Kangaroo Court and it wouldn’t make any difference whether we had any evidence or not. The Kangaroo Court is the last word in physical humour. It’s even rougher than taking the Imperial Callithumpian Degree in the Order of the Ornery and Worthless Men of the World.

The last straw fell on us in the home town. Jorgenson came into the dressing room one afternoon with a handful of big square envelopes. There was one for every man on the team.

I opened mine and there was a stiff sheet of cardboard inside of it printed in script. I didn’t save mine, but it read something like this:

 

Mr. Augustus P. Stringer requests the honour of your company at dinner, at the Algonquin Club, 643—Avenue, at seven-thirty on the evening of May the Twelfth, Nineteen Hundred and—. Formal.

 

Well, there was quite a buzz of excitement over it.

“Who is this Mr. Stringer?” asks Uncle Billy. “Any of you boys know him!”

Nobody seemed to, but that wasn’t remarkable. All sorts of people give dinners to ballplayers during the playing season. I’ve seen some winters when a good feed would come in handy, but a ballplayer is only strong with the public between April and October. The rest of the year nobody cares very much whether he eats or not.

“He’s probably some young sport who wants to show us a good time and brag about what a whale of a ballplayer he used to be in college,” says Pat Dunphy.

“You’re wrong!” says Peachy Parsons. “Ten to one you’re wrong! I never saw this Mr. Stringer, but I’ll bet I’ve got him pegged to a whisper. In the first place I know about this Algonquin Club. It’s the oldest and the most exclusive club in the city. Nothing but rich men belong to it. You can go by there any night and see ’em sitting in the windows, holding their stomachs in their laps. Now this Mr. Stringer is probably a nice old man with a sneaking liking for baseball. He wants to entertain us, but at the same time he’s afraid that we’re a lot of lowbrows and that we’ll show him up before the other club members.”

“What makes you think that?” asks Dunphy.

“Simple enough. He’s got an idea that we don’t know what to wear to a banquet, so he tips us off. He puts ‘formal’ down in one corner.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s not usually put on an invitation. It means the old thirteen-and-the-odd. Clawhammer, white tie, silk hat and all the rest of it.”

“How about a ‘tux’?”

“Absolutely barred. A tuxedo isn’t formal.”

“That settles it!” says Dunphy. “I don’t go. If this bird don’t want to see me in my street clothes he don’t need to see me at all. I never bought one of those beetle-backed coats and I never will!”

“Come now,” says Uncle Billy, “don’t get excited. I know a place where you can rent an entire outfit for two bucks, shoes and all.”

“Oh, well,” says Dunphy, “in that case—”

The more we talked about it, the stronger we were taken with the idea. It would be something to say that we’d had dinner at the Algonquin Club. We warned Tom O’Connor that none of his rough comedy would go. He got awfully sore about it. One word led to another and finally he said if we felt that way about it he wouldn’t go. We tried to persuade him that it wasn’t quite the thing to turn down an invitation, but he wouldn’t listen.

You never saw such a hustling round or such a run on the gents’ furnishing goods. Everybody was buying white shirts, white ties and silk socks. If we were going to do it at all we felt that it might as well be done right, and of course we wanted to show Mr. Stringer that we knew what was what. Those who didn’t own evening clothes hired ’em for the occasion, accordion hats and all. We met a couple of blocks away from the club and marched over in a body like a lot of honourary pall-bearers.

We got by the outer door all right and into the main room where some old gentlemen were sitting round, smoking cigars and reading the newspapers. They seemed kind of annoyed about something and looked at us as if they took us for burglars in disguise, which they probably did. Up comes a flunky in uniform, knee-breeches and mutton-chop whiskers. Uncle Billy did the talking for the bunch.

“Tell Mr. Stringer that we’re here,” says he.

“I—beg your pardon?” says the flunky.

“You don’t need to do that,” says Uncle Billy. “Just run along and tell Mr. Stringer that his guests are here.”

The flunky seemed puzzled for a minute, and then he almost smiled.

“Ah!” says he. “The—Democratic Club is on the opposite corner, sir. Possibly there has been some mistake.”

Uncle Billy began to get sore. He flashed his invitation and waved it under the flunky’s nose.

“It says here the Algonquin Club. You don’t look it, but maybe you can read.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” says the flunky. He examined the invitation carefully and then he shook his head. “Very, very sorry, sir, says he, “but there is some mistake.”

“How can there be any mistake?” roars Uncle Billy. “Where is Mr. Stringer?”

“That is what I do not know, sir,” says the flunky. “We have no such member, sir.”

Well, that was a knock-out. Even Uncle Billy didn’t know what to say to that. The rest of us stood round on one foot and then on the other like a lot of clothing-store dummies. One of the old gentlemen motioned to the flunky, who left us, but not without looking back every few seconds as if he expected us to start something.

“James,” pipes up the old gentleman, “perhaps they have been drinking. Have you telephoned for the police?”

“They don’t seem to be violent yet, sir,” says James. Then he came back to us and explained again that he was very, very sorry, but there must be some mistake. No Mr. Stringer was known at the Algonquin Club.

“This way out, gentlemen,” says James.

I think I was the first one that tumbled to it. We were going down the steps when it struck me like a thousand of brick.

“Stringer!” says I. “We’ve been strung all right. Tom O’Connor has gone back to the legitimate!”

“No wonder he didn’t want to come!” says everybody at once.

We stood on the corner under the lamppost and held an indignation meeting, the old gentlemen looking down at us from the windows as if they couldn’t make up their minds whether we were dangerous or not. We hadn’t decided what we ought to do with Tom when the reporters began to arrive. That cinched it. Every paper had been tipped off by telephone that there was a good josh story at the Algonquin Club, and the funny men had been turned loose on it. Uncle Billy grabbed me by the arm.

“Tip the wink to Dunphy and Parsons and let’s get out of this,” says he. “I don’t often dude myself up and it seems a shame to waste it. We will have dinner at the Casino and frame up a come-back on O’Connor.”

I’ve always said that, in spite of his queer notions about certain things, Uncle Billy is a regular human being. The dinner that he bought us that night proved it, and the idea that he got, along with the coffee, made it even stronger.

“Do you boys know any actresses?” said he. “I mean any that are working in town now?”

“I know Hazel Harrington,” says Parsons.

“Ah-hah,” says Uncle Billy. “That’s the pretty one in Paris Up to Date, eh?” Why, the old rascal even had a line on the musical comedy stars! “Is she a good fellow?”

“Best in the world!” says Parsons. “And a strong baseball fan.”

“Fine!” says Uncle Billy and he snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Pencil and paper and messenger boy—quick! Now then, Peachy, write this lady a note and say that we will be highly honoured if she will join us here after the show to discuss a matter of grave importance to the Old Guard. Say that you will call in a taxi to get her.”

When the note had gone Uncle Billy lighted a fresh cigar and chuckled to himself.

“If she’ll go through with it,” says he, “I’ll guarantee to knock all the funny business out of Tom O’Connor for the rest of his natural life.”

Miss Harrington turned up about eleven-thirty, even prettier off the stage than on it, which is going some. She said that she had side-stepped a date with a Pittsburgh millionaire because we were real people. That was a promising start. She ordered a light supper of creamed lobster and champagne and then Uncle Billy began to talk.

He told her that as a manager he was in a bad fix. He said he had a new man on the payroll who was promoting civil war. He explained that unless he was able to tame this fellow the team would be crippled. Miss Harrington said that would be a pity, for she had bet on us to win the pennant. She wanted to know what was the matter. Uncle Billy told her all about Tom O’Connor and his practical jokes. Miss Harrington said it would be a good thing to give him a dose of his own medicine. It was like Uncle Billy to let her think that the idea belonged to her.

“Suppose,” says Uncle Billy, “you should get a note from him, asking you to meet him at the stage door some night next week. For the sake of the ball club, would you say ‘Yes’?”

“But—what would happen after that?” asked Miss Harrington. “I don’t know the man at all and—”

Uncle Billy told her what would happen after that, and as it dawned on the rest of us we nearly rolled out of our chairs. Miss Harrington laughed too.

“It would be terribly funny,” said she, “and I suppose it would serve him right; but it might get into the papers and—”

Uncle Billy shook his head.

“My dear young lady,” says he, “the only publicity that you get in this town is the publicity that you go after. I am well and favourably known to the police. A lot of ’em get annual passes from me. Captain Murray at the Montmorency Street Station is my pal. He can see a joke without plans and specifications. I promise you that the whole thing will go off like clockwork. We’ll suppose that you have attracted the young man’s attention during the performance. You would attract any man’s attention, my dear.”

“I would stand up and bow for that compliment,” said Miss Harrington, “but the waiter is looking. Go on.”

“We will suppose that you have received a note from him,” said Uncle Billy. “He is to meet you at the stage door. . . . One tiny little scream—just one. . . . Would you do that—for the sake of the ball club?”

Miss Harrington giggled.

“If you’re sure that you can keep me out of it,” said she, “I’ll do it for the sake of the joke!”

Uncle Billy was a busy man for a few days, but he found time to state that he didn’t believe that Tom O’Connor had anything to do with the Algonquin Club thing. He said it was so clever that Tom couldn’t have thought of it, and he said it in the dressing room so loud that everybody heard him. Maybe that was the reason why Tom didn’t suspect anything when he was asked to fill out a box party.

Pat Dunphy, Peachy Parsons and some of the rest of us were in on the box party, playing thinking parts mostly. Uncle Billy and Tom O’Connor had the front seats right up against the stage.

Miss Harrington was immense. If she’d had forty rehearsals she couldn’t have done it any better. Before she’d been on the stage three minutes Tom was fumbling round for his programme trying to find her name. Pretty soon he began to squirm in his chair.

“By golly, that girl is looking at me all the time!” says he.

“Don’t kid yourself!” said Uncle Billy.

“But I tell you she is! There—did you see that?”

“Maybe she wants to meet you,” says Uncle Billy. I’ve seen her at the ball park a lot of times.”

“You think she knows who I am?” asks Tom.

“Shouldn’t wonder. You’re right, Tom. She’s after you, that’s a fact.”

“Oh, rats!” says O’Connor. “Maybe I just think so. No, there it is again! Do you suppose, if I sent my card back—”

“I’m a married man,” says Uncle Billy. “I don’t suppose anything. But if a girl as pretty as that—”

Tom went out at the end of the first act. I saw him write something on a card and slip it to an usher along with a dollar bill.

When the second act opened Tom was so nervous he couldn’t sit still. It was easy to see that he hadn’t received any answer to his note and was worrying about it. Pretty soon Miss Harrington came on to sing her song about the moon—they’ve always got to have a moon song in musical comedy or it doesn’t go—and just as the lights went down she looked over toward our box and smiled, the least little bit of a smile, and then she nodded her head. The breath went out of Tom O’Connor in a long sigh.

“Somebody lend me twenty dollars,” says he.

“I’m going to meet her at the stage door after the show,” says Tom, “and she won’t think I’m a sport unless I open wine.”

Well, he met her all right enough. The whole bunch of us can swear to that because we were across the street, hiding in a doorway. When she came out Tom stepped up, chipper as a canary bird, with his hat in his hand. We couldn’t hear what he said, but there was no trouble in hearing Miss Harrington.

“How dare you, sir!” she screams. “Help! Police! Help!”

Two men, who had been loafing round on the edge of the sidewalk, jumped over and grabbed Tom by the arms. He started in to explain matters to ’em, but the men dragged him away down the street and Miss Harrington went in the other direction.

“So far, so good,” says Uncle Billy. “Gentlemen, the rest of the comedy will be played out at the Montmorency Street Police Station. Reserved seats are waiting for us. Follow me.”

You can say anything you like, but it’s a pretty fine thing to be in right with the police. You never know when you may need ’em, and Uncle Billy certainly was an ace at the Montmorency Street Station. We went in by the side door and were shown into a little narrow room with a lot of chairs in it, just like a moving-picture theatre, except that instead of a curtain at the far end there was a tall Japanese screen. What was more, most of the chairs were occupied. Every member of the Old Guard ball club was there, and so was Al Jorgenson and Lije, the rubber.

“Boys,” says Uncle Billy, “we are about to have the last act of the thrilling drama entitled The Kidder Kidded, or The Old Guard’s Revenge. The first and second acts went off fine. Be as quiet as you can and don’t laugh until the blow-off. Not a whisper—not a sound—s-s-sh! They’re bringing him in now!”

There was a scuffling of feet and a scraping of chair-legs on the other side of the screen. We couldn’t see O’Connor and he couldn’t see us, but we could hear every word he said. He was still trying to explain matters.

“But I tell you,” says Tom, “I had a date with her.”

“Yeh,” says a gruff voice, “she acted like it! Don’t tell us your troubles. Tell ’em to Captain Murray. Here he comes now.”

A door opened and closed and another voice cut in:

“Well, boys, what luck?”

“We got one, cap,” says the gruff party. “Caught him with the goods on—”

“It’s all a mistake, sir—captain!” Tom breaks in. “I give you my word of honour as a gentleman—”

“Shut up!” says Captain Murray. “Your word of honour as a gentleman! That’s rich, that is! You keep your trap closed for the present—understand? Now, boys, where did you get him?”

“At the stage door of the Royal Theatre,” says the plain-clothes man, who did the talking for the two who made the pinch. “Duffy and me, we saw this bird kind of slinking round, and we remembered that order about bringing in all mashers, so we watched him. A girl came out of the stage door and he braced her. She hollered for help and we grabbed him. Oh, there ain’t any question about it, cap; we’ve got him dead to rights. We don’t even need the woman’s testimony.”

“Good work, boys!” says the captain. “We’ll make an example of this guy!”

“Captain,” says Tom, “listen to reason! I tell you this girl was flirting with me all through the show—”

“That’s what they all say! If she was flirting with you, why did she make a holler when you braced her?”

“I—I don’t know,” says Tom. “Maybe she didn’t recognise me.”

“No, I’ll bet she didn’t!”

“But, captain, I sent her my card and she sent back word—”

“Oh, shut up! What’s your name?” Murray shot that one at him quick and Tom took a good long time to answer it.

“Smith,” says he at last. “John Smith.” That raised a laugh on the other side of the screen.

“Well,” says the captain, “unless we can get him identified he can do his bit on the rock pile under the name of Smith as well as any other, eh, boys?”

“Sure thing!” said the plain-clothes men.

“The rock pile!” says Toms.

“That’s what I said—rock pile! Kind of scares you, don’t it. There won’t be any bail for you to jump or any fine for you to pay. We’ve had a lot of complaints about mashers lately and some squeals in the newspapers. You’ll be made an example of. Chickens are protected by the game laws of this state, and it’s time some of the lady-killers found it out.”

Tom began to plead, but he might just as well have kept quiet. They whirled in and gave him the third degree—asked him what he had been pinched for the last time and a whole lot of stuff. We expected he’d tell his name and send for Uncle Billy to get him out, but for some reason or other he fought shy of that. We couldn’t understand his play at first, but we knew why soon enough. The door back of the screen opened again.

“Cap’n,” says a strange voice, “there’s some newspaper men here.”

Well, that was all a stall, of course. We didn’t let the newspaper men in on it because we wanted them for a whip to hold over Tom’s head in the future.

“What do they want?” asks Murray.

“They’re after this masher story,” says the stranger. “I don’t know who tipped it off to ’em, but they’ve seen the woman and got a statement from her. She says she thinks this fellow is a baseball player.”

“I wouldn’t care if he was the president of the League!” says the captain. “You know the orders we got to break up mashing and bring ’em in, no matter who they are. Here we’ve got one of ’em dead to rights; and it’s the rock pile for him, you can bet your life on it!”

“And serve him right,” says the stranger. “But, cap’n, wouldn’t it be a good thing to identify him? These newspapermen say they know all the ballplayers. Shall we have ’em in to give him the once-over?”

“I’ll send for ’em in a minute,” says Murray.

That was the shot that brought Tom off his perch with a yell.

“Captain,” he begs, “anything but that! I’d rather you sent me up for six months—yes, or shot me! If this gets into the papers it’ll——! Oh, say, if you have any heart at all—please—please——Oh, you don’t understand!”

We didn’t understand either, but Tom made it plain. I’m not going to write all he said; it made my face burn to sit there and listen to it. It took all the fun out of the joke for me. It seems that this rough kidder—this practical joker who never cared a rap how much he hurt anybody else’s feelings—had some pretty tender feelings of his own. He opened up his heart and told that police captain something that he never had told us—told him about the little girl back in the home town who was waiting for him, and how she wouldn’t ever be able to hold up her head again if the story got into the papers and he was disgraced.

“It ain’t for me, captain,” he begs; “it’s for her. You wouldn’t want her shamed just because I’ve acted like a fool, would you? Think what it means to the girl, captain! Oh, if there’s anything you can do——”

Uncle Billy beat me to it. I was already on my feet when he took two jumps and knocked the screen flat on the floor.

“That’s enough!” says Uncle Billy. We had planned to give Tom the horse-laugh when the screen came down, but somehow none of us could laugh just then. If I live to be as old as Hans Wagner I’ll never forget the expression on Tom O’Connor’s face as he blinked across the room and saw us all sitting there, like an audience in a theatre.

“Tom,” says Uncle Bill, “I’m sorry, but this is what always happens with a practical joke. It starts out to be funny, but it gets away from you and then the first thing you know somebody is hurt. You’ve had a lot of fun with this ball club, my boy, and some of it was pretty rough fun, but—I guess we’ll all agree to call it square.”

Tom got on his feet, shaking a little and white to the lips. He couldn’t seem to find his voice for a minute and he ran his fingers across his mouth before he spoke.

“Is—is this a joke?” says he.

“It started out to be,” says Uncle Billy. “I’m sorry.”

Tom didn’t say another word and he didn’t look at any of us. He went out of the room alone and left us there. I wanted to go after him and tell him not to take it so hard; but I thought of the way he had shamed Al Jorgenson, I thought of the girl who wouldn’t even speak to Holliday again, I thought of the four kids who went home broken-hearted, all on Tom’s account—and I changed my mind. It was a bitter dose, but I decided not to sweeten it any for him.

Tom O’Connor isn’t funny any more, and I think he is slowly making up his mind that we’re not such a bad outfit after all. To this day the mention of the name of Smith makes him blush, so I guess that in spite of the fact that he’s never opened his mouth about it since, he hasn’t forgotten what his own stuff feels like.