Stepping off the train shortly after seven, the southpaw went at once to the hotel. The first man he ran into in the lobby was Buck Fargo. The expression on his chum’s face made Lefty’s heart sink into his boots. “Where the deuce have you been?” the backstop inquired directly, and with force. “How’d you happen to duck?” “For Heaven’s sake, Buck,” the young pitcher appealed fervently, “don’t tell me you didn’t get my note?” “If it explained what in thunder made you do such a fool trick as this, I most certainly didn’t,” Fargo returned. Locke groaned aloud. “I left it on the table. I told you just what had happened and why I had to rush off. I asked you to explain to the old man――” Catching a sudden warning in Fargo’s eyes, Lefty stopped abruptly and turned slowly around. Brennan stood just behind him, his hands on his hips, an expression on his square, heavy-jowled face which even the big backstop had rarely seen there before. “Well?” he questioned in an ominous voice, his sharp, deep-set eyes boring into Lefty’s brown ones. “Did I hear you say anything about an explanation? Strikes me it’s about time something of the sort was dished up.” His voice, cold, hard, and unrelenting, sent a flicker up and down Locke’s spine. If the man had only flared out at him, roared, bellowed, it would have been better than this. But that harsh, flinty, absolutely pitiless tone struck a chill to the youngster’s heart, and quenched the last spark of hope in him. “I had――a telegram――this morning,” he explained unevenly. “It came just as I was leaving for the field. It was from――a close friend of mine who is at Billings, with her father. She said that her father was dying, and asked me to come at once. She was all alone in a strange place. They knew no one. They had been in the South only a few weeks. I _had_ to go.” He hesitated an instant, glancing desperately at Brennan’s face. Something in it――the flicker of an eyelash, perhaps, or the faintest possible relaxing of that steely, set expression,――made a tiny spark of hope revive in Lefty’s breast. “Well, go on,” growled Brennan. “There wasn’t time to send you word,” Locke continued. “I had to make the nine-five train. So I wrote a note to Fargo explaining things, and asked him to tell you about it. I left it on the table in our room. You must have missed it, Buck, or didn’t you go to the room?” He turned eagerly to his friend, but the latter shook his head. “There wasn’t any note,” he said slowly. “I was up there at noon and again to-night. There ain’t nothing on the table but a couple of magazines and a lamp. Mebbe it got blown off.” “Perhaps that was it,” Lefty agreed. “I wrote it and stuck it up where you’d see it the first thing.” He glanced again at Brennan and met the man’s searching gaze unflinchingly. For an instant there was silence as the manager scowled deeply to hide his annoyance.