"That is just what we intend to do!" said Butch, with grim humor. "But--we'll have a dummy in the ninth position, to make the people believe we have a full nine! Cheer up, Hicks--'In the bright lexicon of youth there ain't no such word as fail,' you say! As for your making a fool of yourself, you haven't brains enough to be classed as one! Now--you'll pay dearly for your bonehead play." Ten minutes later, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., as agitated as a _prima donna_ making her début with the Metropolitan: Opera Company, decorated the Bannister bench, arrayed in one of the substitutes' baseball suits. It was too large for his splinter-structure, so that it flapped grotesquely, giving him a startling resemblance to a scarecrow escaped from a cornfield. With the thermometer of his spirits registering zero, the dismayed youth, whose punishment was surely fitting the crime, heard the Umpire bellow: "Play ball! Batter up! Bannister at bat--Ballard in the field!" Hicks, that sunny-souled youth, had often daydreamed of himself in a big game of baseball, for his college. He had vividly imagined a ninth inning crisis, three of the enemy on base, two out, and a long fly, good for a home-run, soaring over his head. How he had sprinted--back--back--and at the last second, reached high in the air, grabbing the soaring spheroid, and saving the game for his Alma Mater! Often, too, he had stepped up to bat in the final frame, with two out, one on base, and Bannister a run behind. With the vast crowd silent and breathless, he had walloped the ball, over the left-field fence, and jogged around the bases, thrilling to the thunderous cheers of his comrades. But now-- _"Oooo!"_ shivered Hicks, as though he had just stepped beneath an icy shower-bath. "I wish I could run away. I just _know_ they'll knock every ball to me, and I couldn't catch one with a sheriff and posse!" However, since, despite the blithesome Hicks' lack of confidence, it was that sunny Senior, after all, whom fate--or fortune, accordingly as each nine viewed it--destined to be the hero of the Bannister-Ballard Championship baseball contest, the game itself is shoved into such insignificance that it can be briefly chronicled by recording the events that led up to T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.'s, self-prophesied "head-work."