: Catcher Craig by Mathewson Christy Relyea C M Charles M Illustrator - Baseball Juvenile fiction; Baseball stories

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FACING PAGE

"Well, Craig, so you found us, eh?" asked the short man, with a smile and a firm clasp of the hand 36

"From the ear, Sam! From the ear!" 308

CATCHER CRAIG

SAM MAKES A PURCHASE

It was a window to gladden any boy's heart. Behind the big plate-glass pane were baseball bats of all sorts and prices, masks and protectors, gloves and mitts, balls peeking temptingly forth from their tin-foil wrappers, golf clubs and bags, running shoes and apparel, and many, many other things to send a chap's hand diving into his pocket.

Sam Craig's hand was already there, jingling the few coins he had with him, while his gaze wandered raptly over the enticing array. Always, though, it returned to the display of catcher's mitts.

He was seventeen, a sturdy, brown-haired youth with a well-tanned face from which dark grey eyes looked untroubledly forth. As he stood there in front of Cummings and Wright's window his feet were planted apart, his attitude seeming to say: "Here I am and here I stay!" And the resolute expression of his face backed up the assertion of his body, so that, had you for any reason wished to move Sam from in front of that window, it would never have occurred to you to try force. If persuasion failed you'd have let him stay there!

You wouldn't have called Sam handsome, although, judged separately, his features were all good. His nose was straight and short, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth fairly wide and firm, and his chin purposeful. What you might have mistaken for a dimple in the cleft of the chin was in reality only a tiny scar, the result of collision with the point of a newly sharpened pencil caused by a fall on an icy sidewalk many years before. When accounting for that scar Sam was wont to indulge in one of his infrequent jokes. There was, he would tell you, a queer coincidence about it; it had happened in Faber-ary. If, through ignorance of the brand of pencils affected in Amesville, you missed the point of the joke, Sam didn't explain it. He had evolved that pun all himself, and, not being addicted to airy persiflage, thought rather well of it. Consequently, if you didn't catch it, Sam thought poorly of your sense of humour and wasted no effort on you. He appreciated jokes when he heard them, but seldom perpetrated one himself. And his appreciation was seldom demonstrative. When others laughed Sam confined himself to a slight lifting of one corner of his mouth and a quizzical expression in his calm grey eyes. When others doubled themselves over and frankly shouted their amusement, Sam merely chuckled.

He was captain of the Amesville High School Baseball Team. When, two days after the final contest with Petersburg, a contest which had resulted in a victory for Amesville and given the Brown-and-Blue the season's championship, the players had met to choose a leader for the next year, the honour had gone to Sam. Probably had Tom Pollock, whose heady pitching had done more than anything else to win the Petersburg series, been in his final year at high school, the captaincy would have gone to him by acclamation. But Tom was still a junior and it was the custom to elect a senior, and, with Tom out of it, the choice fell naturally on Sam. The school at large was well satisfied. Sam Craig was well liked. It would be stretching a point to say that he was popular, for he was quiet, unassuming, and kept pretty much to himself, and in consequence made friends slowly. Certainly he was not socially popular as was Sidney Morris, nor was he hailed as a hero as was Tom Pollock. But he was liked and respected, and, if he wasn't called a hero, few failed to realise that his steady, always cool-headed and sometimes brilliant work behind the bat had had more than a little to do with the successful outcome of the season just finished. Sam's election had been made unanimous, Sam had faltered a much embarrassed speech of acceptance, and the team had disbanded for the summer.

To-day, a bright, warm morning in the latter part of June and just over a week after the election, Sam was seriously debating a momentous question, which was whether to deplete his slender hoard of spending-money for one of the brand-new mitts lying so temptingly beyond the glass, or to save his money and make his old one, a thing of many honourable scars, do him until next spring. If, he told himself, he had a lot of money, there were many things in that window he would buy: a new ball--his own had been several times restitched--a new mask and--yes, by jingo, if he could afford it!--one of those dandy black-tipped bats bearing the facsimile signature of a noted Big Leaguer. More than once his hand came out of his pocket and more than once he half turned away, but each time his fingers went back to the coins again, and, at last, he entered the wide, hospitably open door of the big hardware and sporting-goods store. If he had not done so this story would have been far different, for more than the purchase of a catcher's mitt resulted from his visit that morning to Cummings and Wright's.

The front of the store, to the left as you entered, was devoted to the sporting goods. The department was only about two years old, but already it had thrice outgrown its limit, until now it occupied fully a third of the store's space. There were racks of golf clubs, shelves filled with enticing boxes, handsome show-cases over which a red-blooded boy could hang entranced for a long time, polished counters holding things cunningly displayed, and, between window and cases, an oak-topped desk, at which a boy of about Sam's age was busily writing. He was a capable-looking fellow, with much red-brown hair and a pair of frank and honest blue eyes and a nice smile. And the smile appeared the minute he glanced up from the letter he was writing and glimpsed Sam over the top of the desk.

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