Presently Jack Stillman came up and chatted casually for a minute or two, but Lefty was so mortally averse to pity that his replies were short almost to ungraciousness; and the reporter walked away, a puzzled look on his face. By dint of fast, strenuous playing on the part of the cubs, assisted by the easy-going ways of their opponents, the regulars were kept from further scoring, while the Yannigans made two tallies before the end of the last inning. But for Locke’s errors they would have won the game. The realization did not tend toward soothing their ruffled spirits. As the teams mingled on the field at the end of the fifth inning, the one crowd grinning and joshing, the other responding with defensive sarcasm, Lefty caught an angry glare from more than one pair of eyes among the disappointed youngsters. “I s’pose they all have it in for me,” he muttered. The next instant he saw Jim Brennan bearing down upon him, his face more florid than ever, his sharp eyes glinting. “Good night!” the southpaw murmured. “Here’s my finish.” Instinctively he rose to his feet and stood there, nervously juggling his glove, his eyes fixed upon the approaching manager, waiting for the storm to break. CHAPTER XIII THE DISCHARGED WAITER Lefty drew one sleeve across his perspiring face, and stared at the square, sturdy back of the retreating manager. “Whew!” he muttered. “And then some!” On second thought, he withdrew the comment. Jim Brennan had left nothing to be said, nothing to the imagination. In stinging phrases, which bit like acid and made the pitcher wince and grit his teeth, he had told his latest recruit exactly what he thought of such a disgrace among ball players. He applied to Locke every epithet in his repertory――he had a vocabulary the width and breadth and startling nature of which was unusual even among Big League managers――and Lefty was obliged to stand there and swallow everything. He had nothing to say, no excuse to make for his behavior. He might have explained everything by telling Brennan of the glass of beer which he was certain had been drugged. But that would have put the whole crowd in bad, and Lefty was no telltale. So he set his jaws, clenched his fists, and took everything the manager had to say, fully expecting the tirade to end in his being thrown out of the squad. When Brennan finally concluded his spirited monologue with a pyrotechnic burst to the effect that he proposed taking the blankety-blank bonehead personally in hand the next morning for the purpose of beating a little elemental baseball into his thick skull, and then strode away with eyebrows twitching, it was a full minute before Lefty realized that it had not come. He had not been fired! “Well, I’ll be hanged!” he exclaimed aloud, his eyebrows drawn together in a puzzled frown. “Why didn’t he do it? What use can he have for me after to-day?”