“Sure, if I needed the money,” was the answer. “I wouldn’t be a professional ball player and expect to stick at it all my life. You can’t do it. The pace is too hard. But if I had the ability and could command a good salary for playing ball I’d do it, and keep my eyes open for something better. I know a chap who played professional ball for six years and studied law in the winter and whenever he got a chance. Then he went into an office two winters. After that he quit baseball and now he’s doing well over in Trenton. Lots of folks think professional baseball is like highway robbery or something. They class professional ball players and prize fighters and thugs all together. I guess there was a time when some ball players were a roughish lot, but that’s gone by. Most of them are just like the rest of us nowadays. A lot of them lead cleaner lives than the folks who knock them. They have to, for one thing. Anyway, they do it. You can be a professional ball player now and be a gentleman, too. Most of them are. A great many are college fellows; practically all are educated. They don’t expect to make a life’s work of it, you see. They’ve got the gift of playing good ball and they turn it into money, just the same as a man who has the gift of teaching Greek turns it into money. It’s just a business proposition. Where your ball player has it on some of the rest of us is just here: he likes his work and we don’t!” Pattern knocked the ashes from his pipe against the edge of the platform and yawned. “I’ve got to get back,” he announced. “It’s nearly one. Think over what I said about joining an amateur team and getting practice, my boy. That’s your best move.” He nodded, smiled, and hurried away, leaving Wayne, for some reason, rather excited. He had never considered playing baseball for a living, had never taken his ability seriously. He had known since he was fourteen that he could field and throw and bat far better than his playmates, but he had accepted the fact without concern. They had made him captain of his school team in his last year and he had led them through a season of almost uninterrupted victories. And that summer he had played twice a week with the “White Sox,” a local aggregation formed by the young men and older boys in Sleepersville, holding down third base with phenomenal success and winning renown with his bat. But never until today had it occurred to him that he might perhaps earn money in such a simple way as playing a game he loved. It didn’t sound sensible, he thought. Why, he would be glad to play baseball for his board and lodging alone! Glad to do it for nothing if he could afford to! To receive thirty-five dollars a week, or even twenty, for doing it sounded absurd. But, of course, fellows did get paid for it, and--and--well, it was something to think over!