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“Four-eyes” they called me on account of my spectacles until a new nickname came at the last half of the ninth inning, when we were in the field with the score four to three in our favor. It was then that a small, fat boy with a paper megaphone longer than he was waddled out almost to first base and levelling his trumpet at me, thundered out in a sudden silence:

“Hello, Foxy Grandpa!” That was too much. I got rattled, and when there were three men on bases and two out, a swift grounder came to me, I fell–catching it–and threw wildly to first from my knees. I heard shouts of horror, anger, and distress from everywhere and my own heart stopped beating–I had lost the game–and then Marston leaped in the air–surely it must have been four feet–caught the ball with his left hand and dropped back on the bag. The sound of his foot on it and the runner’s was almost simultaneous, but the umpire said Marston’s was there first. Then bedlam! One of my brothers was umpire and the captain of the other team walked threateningly out toward him, followed by two of his men with base-ball bats. As I started off myself towards them I saw, with the corner of my eye, another brother of mine start in a run from the left field, and I wondered why a third, who was scoring, sat perfectly still in his chair, particularly as a well-known, red-headed tough from one of the mines who had been officiously antagonistic ran toward the pitcher’s box directly in front of him. Instantly a dozen of the guard sprang toward it, some man pulled his pistol, a billy cracked straightway on his head, and in a few minutes order was restored. And still the brother scoring hadn’t moved from his chair, and I spoke to him hotly.

“Keep your shirt on,” he said easily, lifting his score-card with his left hand and showing his right clinched about his pistol under it.

“I was just waiting for that red-head to make a move. I guess I’d have got him first.”

I walked back to the Blight and the little sister and both of them looked very serious and frightened.

“I don’t think I want to see a real fight, after all,” said the Blight. “Not this afternoon.”

It was a little singular and prophetic, but just as the words left her lips one of the Police Guard handed me a piece of paper.

“Somebody in the crowd must have dropped it in my pocket,” he said. On the paper were scrawled these words:

“Look out for the Wild Dog!”

I sent the paper to Marston.

VII. AT LAST–THE TOURNAMENT

At last–the tournament! Ever afterward the Hon. Samuel Budd called it “The Gentle and Joyous Passage of Arms–not of Ashby–but of the Gap, by-suh!” The Hon. Samuel had arranged it as nearly after Sir Walter as possible. And a sudden leap it was from the most modern of games to a game most ancient.

No knights of old ever jousted on a lovelier field than the green little valley toward which the Hon. Sam waved one big hand. It was level, shorn of weeds, elliptical in shape, and bound in by trees that ran in a semicircle around the bank of the river, shut in the southern border, and ran back to the northern extremity in a primeval little forest that wood-thrushes, even then, were making musical–all of it shut in by a wall of living green, save for one narrow space through which the knights were to enter. In front waved Wallens’ leafy ridge and behind rose the Cumberland Range shouldering itself spur by spur, into the coming sunset and crashing eastward into the mighty bulk of Powell’s Mountain, which loomed southward from the head of the valley–all nodding sunny plumes of chestnut.

The Hon. Sam had seen us coming from afar apparently, had come forward to meet us, and he was in high spirits.