Weegman rose, chuckling and snapping his fingers. "All this talk about what the Feds can do is gas!" he declared. "They're getting nothing but the soreheads and deadwood of organized baseball, which will be vastly better off without the deserters. Cripples and has-beens may make a good thing out of the Feds for a short time. Perhaps Locke would find it profitable to jump." His meaning was all too plain.

Lefty felt like taking the insinuating fellow by the neck and shaking him until his teeth rattled, but outwardly he was not at all ruffled or disturbed. "Mr. Weegman," he said, "is showing pique because I have not seen fit to sign up as manager of the Blue Stockings. He professes to have authority from Charles Collier to sign the manager, Collier having gone abroad for his health."

"If anybody doubts my authority," shouted Weegman, plunging his hand into an inner pocket of his coat, "I can show the doc.u.ments that will--"

The southpaw had turned his back on him. "I understand you have a clever pitcher in the man known as Mysterious Jones, Wiley," he said.

"A pippin!" was the enthusiastic answer. "I'll give you a chance to see him sagaciate to-day."

"He is a deaf-mute?"

"He couldn't hear a cannon if you fired it right under the lobe of his ear, and he does his talking with his prehensile digits. Leon Ames in his best days never had anything on Jones."

"Strange I never even heard of him. Our scouts have scoured the bushes from one end of the country to the other."

"I never collided with any baseball scouts in Alaska," said Wiley.

"Oh! You found Jones in Alaska?"

"Pitching for a team in Nome."

"But baseball up there! I didn't know--"

"Oh, no; n.o.body ever thinks of baseball up there, but in the all too short summer season there's something doing in that line. Why, even modern dances have begun to run wild in Alaska, so you see they're right up to the present jiffy."

"Where did this Jones originally hail from?"

"Ask me! I don't know. n.o.body I ever met knew anything about him, and what he knows about himself he won't tell. He's mysterious, you understand; but his beautiful work on the slab has caused my cla.s.sic countenance to break into ripples and undulations and convolutions of mirth."

"Where is he? I'd like to give him the once over."

"I think he's out somewhere prowling around the town and sizing up the citizens. That's one of his little vagaries; he has a combustable curiosity about strangers. Every place we go he wanders around for hours lamping the denizens of the burg. Outside baseball, strange people seem to interest him more than anything in the world; but once he has taken a good square look at a person, henceforth and for aye that individual ceases to attract him; if he ever gives anybody a second look, it is one of absolute indifference. Oh, I a.s.sure you with the utmost voracity that Jones is an odd one."

"He must be," agreed Lefty.

"Ay tank, cap'n," said Oleson, the Swede outfielder, "that Yones now bane comin' up the street."

Wiley turned and gazed at an approaching figure. "Yes," he said, "that's him. Turn your binnacle lights on him, Lefty; behold the greatest pitcher adrift in the uncharted regions of baseball."

CHAPTER VI

PECULIAR BEHAVIOR

Jones was rather tall and almost slender, although he had a fine pair of shoulders. His arm was as long as Walter Johnson's. His face was as grave as that of the Sphinx, and held more than a touch of the same somber sadness. His eyes were dark and keen and penetrating; with a single glance they seemed to pierce one through and through. And they were ever on the move, like little ferrets, searching, searching, searching. As he approached the hotel, he met a man going in the opposite direction, and he half paused to give the man a sharp, lance-like stare.

Involuntarily the man drew aside a trifle and, walking on, turning to look back with an expression of mingled questioning and resentment.

But Jones had resumed his habitual pace, his appearance that of a person who, already overburdened, had received one more disappointment.

Barney O'Reilley, the shortstop, laughed. "Sure," said he, "it's a bit of a jump old Jonesy hands any one he looks at fair and hard."

Lefty Locke felt a throb of deep interest and curiosity. There was something about the deaf-mute pitcher of the Wind Jammers that aroused and fascinated him instantly. His first thought was that the man might be mentally unbalanced to a slight degree; but, though he knew not why, something caused him to reject this conviction almost before it was formed. Apparently Jones was well named "Mysterious."

"There's the bird, Lefty," said Cap'n Wiley proudly. "There's the boy who'd make 'em sit up and take notice if ever he got a show in the Big League. Yours truly, the Marine Marvel, knew what he was doing when he plucked that plum in the far-away land of lingering snows."

A queer sound behind him, like a hissing, shuddering gasp, caused Locke to look around quickly. The sound had come from Weegman, who, face blanched, mouth agape, eyes panic-stricken, was staring at the approaching pitcher. Amazement, doubt, disbelief, fear--he betrayed all these emotions. Even while he leaned forward to get a better view over the shoulder of a man before him, he shrank back, crouching like one ready to take to his heels.

Like a person pleased by the sound of his own voice, Cap'n Wiley rattled on in laudation of his mute pitcher. No one save Locke seemed to notice Weegman; and so wholly fascinated by the sight of Jones was the latter that he was quite oblivious to the fact that he had attracted any attention.

"Smoke!" Wiley was saying. "Why, mate, when he uses all his speed, a ball doesn't last a minute; the calorie friction it creates pa.s.sing through the air burns the cover off."

"Ya," supplemented Shaeffer, the catcher, "und sometimes it sets my mitt afire."

"Some speed!" agreed Lefty, as Jones, his head bent, reached the foot of the steps. "He looks tired."

"He's always that way after he tramps around a strange town," said the owner of the Wind Jammers. "Afterward he usually goes to bed and rests, and he comes out to the games as full of fire and kinks as a boy who has stuffed himself with green apples. I'll introduce you, Locke."

The southpaw looked round again. Weegman was gone; probably he had vanished into the convenient door of the hotel. Cap'n Wiley drew Lefty forward to meet the voiceless pitcher, and, perceiving a stranger, Mysterious Jones halted at the top of the steps and stabbed him with a stare full in the face. Lefty had never looked into such searching, penetrating eyes.

Wiley made some deft and rapid movements with his hands and fingers, using the deaf-and-dumb language to make Jones aware of the ident.i.ty of the famous Big League pitcher. Already the mute had lapsed into disappointed indifference, but he accepted Locke's offered hand and smiled in a faint, melancholy way.

"He's feeling especially downcast to-day," explained Wiley, "and so he'll pitch like a fiend this afternoon. He always twirls his best when he's gloomiest; appears to entertain the delusion that he's taking acrimonious revenge on the world for handing him some sort of a raw deal.

It would be a shame to use him against you the whole game, Lefty; he'd make your Grays look like a lot of infirm prunes."

"Spare us," pleaded Locke, in mock apprehension.

Jones did not linger long with his teammates on the veranda. With a solemn but friendly bow to Lefty, he pa.s.sed on into the hotel, Wiley explaining that he was on his way to take his regular daily period of rest. Through the open door the southpaw watched the strange pitcher walk through the office and mount a flight of stairs. And from the little writing room Locke saw Bailey Weegman peer forth, his eyes following the mysterious one until the latter disappeared. Then Weegman hurried to the desk and interviewed the clerk, after which he made an inspection of the names freshly written upon the hotel register.

The man's behavior was singular, and Lefty decided that, for some reason, Weegman did not care to encounter Jones. This suspicion was strengthened when, scarcely more than an hour later, Charles Collier's private secretary appeared at the little cottage occupied by Locke and his wife, and stated that he had made a change from the Magnolia Hotel to the Florida House, a second-rate and rather obscure place on the edge of the colored quarter.

"Couldn't stand for Wiley and his gang of bushwhackers," Weegman explained. "They made me sick, and I had to get out, even though I'm going to leave town at five-thirty this afternoon. That's the first through train north that I can catch. Thought I'd let you know so you could find me in case you changed your mind about that offer."

"You might have spared yourself the trouble," said Locke coldly.

Weegman made a pretense of laughing. "No telling about that. Mules are obstinate, but even they can be made to change their minds if you build a hot enough fire under them. Don't forget where you can find me."

Lefty watched him walking away, and noted that his manner was somewhat nervous and unnatural. "I wonder," murmured the pitcher, "why you put yourself to so much discomfort to avoid Mysterious Jones."

Directed by Locke, the Grays put in an hour of sharp practice that forenoon. As Lefty had stated, the team was practically comprised of winter visitors from the North. Some of them had come South for their health, too. Three were well along in the thirties, and one had pa.s.sed forty. Yet, for all such handicaps, they were an enthusiastic, energetic team, and they could play the game. At least five of them had once been stars on college nines. Having never lost their love for the game, they had rounded into form wonderfully under the coaching of the Big League pitcher. Also, in nearly every game they pulled off more or less of the stuff known as "inside baseball."

They had been remarkably successful in defeating the teams they had faced, but Locke felt sure that, in spite of the conglomerate and freakish appearance of the Wind Jammers, it was not going to be an easy thing to take a fall out of Cap'n Wiley's aggregation of talent.

The self-styled "Marine Marvel" had a record; with players culled from the brambles as he knocked about the country, he had, in former days, put to shame many a strong minor league outfit that had patronizingly and somewhat disdainfully consented to give him an engagement on an off date. Unless the eccentric and humorously boastful manager of the Wind Jammers had lost much of his judgment and cunning during the recent years that he had been out of the public eye, the fastest independent team would have to keep awake and get a fair share of the breaks in order to trounce him.

Locke warmed up his arm a little, but, even though he felt scarcely a twinge of the lameness and stiffness that had given him so much apprehension, he was cautious. At one time, when the trouble was the worst, he had not been able to lift his left hand to his mouth. A ma.s.sage expert in Fernandon had done much for him, and he hoped that he had done not a little for himself by perfecting a new style of delivery that did not put so much strain upon his shoulder. Still, until he should be forced to the test, he could never feel quite sure that he would be the same puzzle to the finest batsmen that he had once been. And it must be confessed that he had looked forward with some dread to the day when that test should come.

Suddenly he resolved that, in a way, he would meet the test at once.

Doubtless the Wind Jammers were batters of no mean caliber, for Wiley had always got together a bunch of sluggers.