"But the game has only just begun," said Alice. "I am still hoping and fearing, and I am not going to be put off of my base, so to speak, by the first news which happens to be good. Only two innings, Ida; remember that." The cheering of the small boys and the excited comments of the still smaller girls, however, proved infectious. One would think that a great battle had been fought, and that victory was already assured to the household troops. The dry-goods man laid down his yard-stick; the carpenter dropped his plane, and even the old bridge-tender forsook his post long enough to stroll into the nearest barber-shop and ask for the news from "the boys" in Sandy Key. "Another bulletin!" cried Hank Jackson, the burly short stop of the Dean County Nine, as the tall form of Mr. Heaton emerged from the telegraph office. This time, the face of the ardent champion of Catalpa's prowess was not illuminated by a smile. Mounting a convenient dry-goods box, he announced that two more innings had been played and that the score then stood two and two, the Black Hawks having made two runs, and the Catalpas having added nothing to their score. A blank silence fell on the assemblage and Henry Jackson vengefully planted his big fist, with a tremendous thud, upon the short ribs of a side of beef that hung from the doorway of Adee's butcher shop. "That for the Black Hawks," he muttered, with clenched teeth. But a great triumph was in store for the friends of the absent sons of Catalpa. Even while Alice Howell was trying to cheer her despondent friend Ida with the suggestion that the game was "yet young," the Editor of _The Leaf_, whose despatches were sent to him across the street in a flying box attached to a wire, put his dishevelled head out of his office window and excitedly cried, "Three cheers for the Catalpa Nine! Fifth inning, Catalpas, five; Black Hawks, one!" There was something like a little groan for the discomfited Black Hawks and then a wild yell broke out for the home nine. The small boys hurrahed shrilly and lustily, and even the street dogs, sharing in the general joy, barked noisily and aimlessly around the edges of the crowd. Miss Anstress Howell, scanning the joyful mob from the windows of her brother's office, remarked to herself, with aggravated sourness, that it was perfectly ridiculous to see Alice mixing herself up there in the street with a lot of lunatics who were making themselves absurd over a pesky base ball game, away down in Sangamon County. It was unaccountable. Judge Howell, sitting on his judicial bench in the court-house on the hill, heard the pother in the town below and covertly smiled behind his large white hand to think that the home nine was undoubtedly doing well in Sandy Key.