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"Didn’t you never run round with ’em?" I says.

"Oh, yes, plenty of ’em," says Ike. "But I never seen none I’d fall for. "

"That is, till you seen this one," says Carey.

"Well," says Ike, "this one’s O. K. , but I wasn’t thinkin’ about gettin’ married yet a wile. "

"Who done the askin’—her?" says Carey.

"Oh, no," says Ike, "but sometimes a man don’t know what he’s gettin’ into. Take a good-lookin’ girl, and a man gen’ally almost always does about what she wants him to. "

"They couldn’t no girl lasso me unless I wanted to be lassoed," says Smitty.

"Oh, I don’t know," says Ike. "When a fella gets to feelin’ sorry for one of ’em it’s all off. "

Well, we left him go after shakin’ hands all round. But he didn’t take Dolly to no show that night. Some time wile we was talkin’ she’d came into that other parlor and she’d stood there and heard us. I don’t know how much she heard. But it was enough. Dolly and Cap’s missus took the midnight train for New York. And from there Cap’s wife sent her on her way back to Missouri.

She’d left the ring and a note for Ike with the clerk. But we didn’t ask Ike if the note was from his friend in Fort Wayne, Texas.

VI

When we’d came to Boston Ike was hittin’ plain . 397. When we got back home he’d fell off to pretty near nothin’. He hadn’t drove one out o’ the infield in any o’ them other Eastern parks, and he didn’t even give no excuse for it.

To show you how bad he was, he struck out three times in Brooklyn one day and never opened his trap when Cap ast him what was the matter. Before, if he’d whiffed oncet in a game he’d of wrote a book tellin’ why.

Well, we dropped from first place to fifth in four weeks and we was still goin’ down. I and Carey was about the only ones in the club that spoke to each other, and all as we did was remind ourself o’ what a boner we’d pulled.

"It’s goin’ to beat us out o’ the big money," says Carey.

"Yes," I says. "I don’t want to knock my own ball club, but it looks like a one-man team, and when that one man’s dauber’s down we couldn’t trim our whiskers. "

"We ought to knew better," says Carey.

"Yes," I says, "but why should a man pull an alibi for bein’ engaged to such a bearcat as she was?"

"He shouldn’t," says Carey. "But I and you knowed he would or we’d never started talkin’ to him about it. He wasn’t no more ashamed o’ the girl than I am of a regular base hit. But he just can’t come clean on no subjec’. "

Cap had the whole story, and I and Carey was as pop’lar with him as an umpire.

"What do you want me to do, Cap?" Carey’d say to him before goin’ up to hit.

"Use your own judgment," Cap’d tell him. "We want to lose another game. "

But finally, one night in Pittsburgh, Cap had a letter from his missus and he come to us with it.

"You fellas," he says, "is the ones that put us on the bum, and if you’re sorry I think they’s a chancet for you to make good. The old lady’s out to St. Joe and she’s been tryin’ her hardest to fix things up. She’s explained that Ike don’t mean nothin’ with his talk; I’ve wrote and explained that to Dolly, too. But the old lady says that Dolly says that she can’t believe it. But Dolly’s still stuck on this baby, and she’s pinin’ away just the same as Ike. And the old lady says she thinks if you two fellas would write to the girl and explain how you was always kiddin’ with Ike and leadin’ him on, and how the ball club was all shot to pieces since Ike quit hittin’, and how he acted like he was goin’ to kill himself, and this and that, she’d fall for it and maybe soften down. Dolly, the old lady says, would believe you before she’d believe I and the old lady, because she thinks it’s her we’re sorry for, and not him. "