Chagrined though he was, Willie did not for an instant accuse his hero of any lack of faithlessness. Indeed, as is the wont of small boyhood, he accepted the rebuff unquestioningly. He made no effort at analysis. It was merely a whimsical cavort of that unreliable Fate that not infrequently plays tricks on those who walk in knickerbockers. So Willie, nothing loth, reasoned simply that as a ticket had never been necessary before, he was quite prepared to gain an entrance to the grounds without one, now. Indeed, even as the young man in the office climbed upon the ledge and gazed off down the road, Willie was examining the fence for loose boards, along the familiar stretch behind the ancient grand stand. Many times and oft, when ball games were in progress, had he, with the assistance of Jimmy Thurston, clambered over that tall board fence frequently to the complete demolishment of his shirt waist, which had a nasty habit of catching on the barbs of the wire that an ingenious care-taker had strung along the top, but, in any event, successfully, to the more important issue of an entrance to the field. To-day, however, he was alone, and getting over the fence was quite a different matter. Since Thursday he had not caught a glimpse of Jimmy, but now he was wishing that the fat, familiar figure of the lad would appear around the corner of the fence. There was not a loose board along the whole stretch, so far as he could discover. Not infrequently he had, with half a dozen sturdy jerks, succeeded in ripping off a plank sufficiently wide to permit of squeezing through; but two days before the same far seeing care-taker who, with so much ingenuity, profanity and trouble, had strung the barbed wire at the top, had gone over the entire stockade and nailed securely every board that seemed to him to be deficient in tightness. It is saddening to tell it; for it rather weakens the character of Willie Trigger, but at the end of his second futile patrol along the fence, he flung himself down at the roots of an ancient apple-tree and cried. Were all the Fates of boyhood set against him this day in June? "Dum it--gosh dum it," he mumbled, gazing through his tears at the forbidding fence, the top of which looked so low yet was so high--too high even when he poised on tiptoe and jumped, clutching. As he stared, his eyes opened wide, the tears were magically whisked away, and he grinned. "Gosh!" he exclaimed aloud, and got upon his feet. A branch of the very tree beneath which he had so disconsolately flung himself, pointed out the way he sought. A single limb--not a thick, sturdy limb, but rather a weak, unstable sort of limb--hung directly above the fence at a most favorable point, immediately behind the grand stand.