Two balls Donovan pitched to Kennedy without finding the plate, and then he put one over. Old Jack let it pass, and heard a strike called. Donovan laughed at him, and Kennedy smiled back serenely. “Give me another just like that, Jim,” he invited. “I’ll hit the next one.” “All right,” returned the pitcher; “all right, Jack, old back number. Here you have it.” Kennedy knew Donovan was lying. He knew the man would pitch something entirely different, and perhaps wholly unexpected, but some inspiration told him just what it would be; and when Donovan put it across the inside corner, Kennedy fell back and met it on the trade-mark. It was a line drive into left. The runner on second tore across third and stretched himself for the plate, while the fielder made a great throw to the pan to stop the score. At the plate, Dillingham, the catcher, took that throw and jabbed the ball at the sliding runner, but nine men out of ten in the crowd saw that the prostrate man’s foot was on the rubber when Dillingham tagged him, and the outspread hands of the umpire declaring him safe was the only manner in which the decision reached them; for it seemed that thirty thousand maniacs filled the stands, the bleachers, and the outfield. Donovan, shaking visibly, and pale as a sheet, braced himself hard while that uproar pounded upon his ears. The game was lost, and he knew it. Between them, Lefty Locke and old Jack Kennedy had won it. It made little difference that, having apparently regained his control, Donovan grinned hard at Lefty when the latter came to bat, and told him he could not hit the ball. Calmly the young southpaw replied: “I don’t have to hit it, Jim; the damage is done.” It made no difference that Donovan struck Locke out. The Blue Stockings had scored, and when Lefty returned to the mound and the Specters faced him in the ninth, he mowed the last three down one after another, as if they were schoolboys. At this moment it seemed that Lefty had triumphed over all obstacles and conquered every foe, but, with the approach of the coming season, he encountered a rival pitcher far more persistent and dangerous than Bert Elgin; a strange and unfathomable character who changed, almost in the flash of an eye, from open-hearted friendship to deadly and vindictive enmity, and as quickly and unexpectedly changed back again; a person enshrouded in mystery, and seemingly the possessor of a dual nature that made him a veritable _Jekyll and Hyde_. The book in which this character, Nelson Savage, appears, is the fourth volume of the Big League Series, and it bears the title of “Lefty o’ the Training Camp.” Had he attempted to reach the clubhouse by crossing the field, Lefty could not have escaped the clutches of the madly exultant crowd. They waited for him, but discreetly, with old Jack Kennedy at his side, he ducked into a runway and disappeared beneath the stand even while the great throng was still cheering, and shrieking his name.