The blood streamed out of his nose, his mouth and his eyes. Down the street came a woman. She took one look and said: “My God, is it you, Frank?” And the old love came back. The wife called two policemen and a cab and started with him to her boarding house. They broke all speed regulations. She called five of the best physicians, and they listened to the beating of his heart—eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—and the doctor said: “He will be dead in about four hours.” She said: “Frank the end is near,” and he said: “Send for Bill.” They telephoned me and I came. When I reached his bedside he said to me: “There’s nothing in the life of years ago I care for now. I can hear the grandstand hiss when I strike out. I can hear the bleachers cheer when I make a hit that wins the game, but there is nothing that can help me now, and if the umpire calls me out now, won’t you say a few words over me, Bill?” He struggled as he had years ago on the diamond when he tried to reach home—but the great Umpire of the universe yelled: “You’re out.” And the great gladiator of the diamond was no more. Frank Flint sat on the street corner drunk with me twenty-seven years ago in Chicago when I said: “I’ll bid you goodbye, boys, I’m going to Jesus.” Say men, did I win the game of life, or did they? BEACON LIGHTS ON BILLY’S TRAIL. I owe God everything. I owe the devil nothing except the best fight I can put up against him. The church needs more of God and less dress and strife over money. Judas bought a ticket to hell for thirty pieces of silver, and it wasn’t a round-trip ticket, either. Every saloon gives the devil a better chance to land your boy in hell. You breed more infidels with your “divine philosophy” than all the Ingersols in the world. The church doesn’t need new members as much as she needs to have the old bunch made over. A lot of people, from the way they live, make you think they’ve got a ticket to heaven on a Pullman parlor car, and have ordered the porter to wake ’em when they get there. But they’ll get side-tracked almost before they’re started. HARD TO KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN. “Somebody says: ‘But you don’t know my circumstances, Mr. Sunday. I’m handicapped by my parents. I’m handicapped by poverty.’ Listen! Go down tonight and get down your books and read of the men of history who have crept and crawled from the sewers of poverty and the quagmires of squalor. Obscurity never kept Benjamin Franklin walking the streets of Philadelphia gnawing at his loaf. Obscurity didn’t keep Edison working as a telegraph operator at $60.00 a month. Obscurity didn’t keep David herding sheep. If gold and diamonds weren’t so hard to get they wouldn’t be worth so much. Obscurity didn’t keep Grant in a tannery. Obscurity didn’t keep Garfield on the towpath of a canal. If you’ve got it in you, squalor and want can’t keep you down.”