“That hadn’t anything to do with it. Your part is to help win games, Tom, and if you can do it better by staying out you ought to stay out. Get that? There’s no sense in a man’s pitching if he isn’t in shape, because it’s a cinch that the other fellows are going to land on him and run away with the game. Take my advice, son, and after this when you’re not up to the mark you say so. You know better than the manager--I mean the coach--how you’re feeling. It’s the team first, every time, son.” Tom wondered a hundred times that week whether he was to be given a chance to redeem himself. Wondered, too, whether, if he was allowed to pitch on Saturday, he would be able to do any better than before. But he felt pretty confident after the game with the Electrics that he would. He realised that his inability to pitch good ball last Saturday was due to physical weariness; and mental weariness, too, perhaps; and not to any loss of cunning in that right arm of his. Saturday dawned breathlessly still and very hot, too hot to eat any breakfast, Tom decided. But Mr. George, who came to the table while Tom was still trifling with a piece of toast and a glass of milk, decided otherwise and made the boy eat two soft-boiled eggs. At the store Mr. Cummings fussed about him all the morning, taking work out of his hands and forever bidding him take things easy and not get tired. If Mr. Cummings could have had his way, Tom would have remained seated in an arm-chair in the office all the forenoon! The game was to begin at three-thirty instead of two-thirty in order to avoid as much of the heat as possible. At luncheon Tom was much too restless and excited, too anxious, in fact, to eat without persuasion. Mr. George supplied the persuasion. After luncheon, seeing that his protégé was “up in the air,” to use his own expression, the detective took him into the side-yard and let him pitch three or four dozen balls leisurely in order to take his mind off the coming contest. Finally, when Mr. George had called a halt, and they were back in the shade of the porch, Tom asked the question that he had been eager to ask for days. “I wonder----” he began. Then he stopped. At last he started again: “Do you suppose, Mr. George, they’re going to let me pitch to-day?”