CHAPTER XLIV BACK TO HIS OWN Not once in a thousand times does such a remarkable situation arise in Big League baseball. Not once in a thousand times would it happen that the two leading teams should be scheduled to play off the last three games of the season together, and have the championship depend upon the result of the final game, which would leave one or the other of those teams in the lead by a very small percentage. To down the Blue Stockings the Specters had to win three straight, and when they had taken the first two the entire baseball world was thrown into a great tumult of excitement, to say nothing of the home city of the Blue Stockings. That city was in a perfect panic, so that business generally was tremendously effected, and all one could hear talked anywhere he went was baseball, baseball, baseball. The newspapers were crammed with it. They were almost savage in their denouncement of the new owner and his judgment in displacing Jack Kennedy and filling the position with a manager like Al Carson. Half of them prophesied that the Specters would take the last three straight, and cop the pennant without difficulty. A few held desperately to the tattered border of hope, begging the Blue Stockings to brace up and save the day by winning the final game. But even as they did this, they confessed that the team’s staff of pitchers was all to the bad, with no one in condition save old Pete Grist, who had already won two games out of the double series of the final week, and was therefore unable to attempt to pitch another game. On the other hand, the Specters had Donovan in reserve, and during the season Donovan had made a record scarcely second to any Big League pitcher. The baseball “dope” in the papers was certainly interesting enough to a genuine fan, though it must have seemed maddening to a reader who cared nothing whatever for the game. Then came the sensation sprung by Stillman in the _Blade_. It made readers generally sit up and take notice. The other newspapers had been “scooped.” Stillman’s sense of the dramatic and his judgment regarding the psychological moment had stood him and his paper in good stead. And when, just as the game was beginning the following day, the _Blade_ appeared with the statement that the pitcher called Stranger, whom Kennedy had brought with him, was none other than Lefty Locke himself, following with a most cleverly written explanation of the cause of Lefty’s vanishing, a complete account of his chance meeting with Kennedy, and how he had pitched in the bush league, winning the championship for the Deers, the scoop was complete.