Curley was erratic and never to be depended on. One day he might pitch a splendid game, and follow it on his next turn with wretched work. Sullivan had a long swing which gave base runners a big lead and made it almost impossible for the best throwing catcher to keep them from stealing. Nor could old Jack break the man of this swing, for when he tried to do so Sullivan’s short-arm delivery proved to be “pie” for the opposing stickers. Heines had an arm that was good for four or five innings, then broke like the most brittle glass. In one pinch, with Heines’ wing failing in the fifth and the Deers having a lead of three runs, Kennedy actually went on to the mound himself. Curley had pitched the day before, and old Jack knew Sullivan’s delivery would hand the game over to the enemy. Never in his life had Kennedy attempted to pitch in anything resembling a league game, and he was not the possessor of as much as one little dinky curve. Yet, using from start to finish an underhanded ball, delivered from the knee and shot upward close across the batter’s shoulder, he managed to pull the game out of the fire by a margin of one lonesome tally. When the Deering fans hailed him as a pitcher Kennedy laughed them to scorn. “That was the greatest case of horseshoes ever,” he declared. “I couldn’t do it again against a bunch of grammar-school kids. Heines had the Stars dizzy by his speed, and when I handed them up that subway rise they simply broke their backs trying to hit it. If I’d begun the game I wouldn’t have lasted an inning.” All this time, of course, he was trying to get hold of other pitchers, and, most of all, he desired a left-hander to use against the Buccaneers, who had five left-handed batters. Somehow he got hold of a southpaw by the name of Billy Winkle, who seemed to have speed, curves, and control. His lack of head might have been balanced by the good judgment of Coffin, who was steadily and swiftly improving behind the bat, but Winkle lacked heart as well as head; and in the breaks the uproar of the rooters, combined with Billy’s fear of what was going to happen, invariably cut the guy ropes. About this time, still eagerly following the career of the Blue Stockings, Kennedy was startled one day when he opened his newspaper and read some black headlines on the first page which told of a railroad disaster in which the Big League team was involved. In the smash seven persons had been killed and twenty-one more or less seriously injured. By rare good fortune the special car containing the ball players had shot down the embankment on its wheels and remained in an upright position after plowing deep into a boggy place at the roadside. It had not been smashed, and, save for a shaking up and a few bruises, not one of the men in that car had been hurt.