"In any case," said the shadow, not wanting to get into a debate about his use of the word _skunk_, "I was as shocked as you all seem to be. "'You don't mean that, Dad!" I said. "'Yes, I do.' "'Well,' I replied. 'I'm going. And some day you'll be proud of me.' "'Proud!' he said. 'You're breaking my heart, and I don't ever want to see you again.' "'I will not break your heart,' I said. 'I'll add more years to your life. You wait and see.' "And so it was that I went to Indianapolis. They optioned me out to Canton in the Central League for the rest of the 1907 season, and I won twenty-three games with them, which was one-third of all the games the Canton Club won that year." "Good for you, Rube!" said Elephant, genuinely proud of his new friend. "The next year--that would have been 1908--I went to Spring Training with the Indianapolis Club. We went to French Lick Springs, Indiana. After three weeks there we went back to Indianapolis and played a few exhibition games before the season opened. Well, believe it or not, the first club to come in for an exhibition game was the Cleveland team: Napoleon Lajoie, Terry Turner, Elmer Flick, George Stovall and the whole bunch that I used to carry bats for. When they came on the field I was already warming up. "'Hey!' a couple of them yelled at me. 'What are you doing here? Are you the bat boy here?' "'No,' I smugly replied. 'I am the pitcher.' "'You, a pitcher?' they jeered. 'Who do you think you're kidding?' "'Just ask Bill Bradley,' I told them. 'He was there when I signed my first contract. You'll see. I'm going to pitch against you guys today, and I'm going to beat you, too.' "'Beat us? Busher, you couldn't beat a drum!' "So then Bill Bradley came over and said hello. As he was leaving he said, 'Richard, you're a nice boy, so I want to give you some advice before today's game. Be careful of the Frenchman.' He meant Napoleon Lajoie. He said, The Frenchman is very sharp and he's been hitting terrific line drives this past week. He's almost killed three of our own pitchers in practice, so there's no telling what he'll do in a real game, even if it is just an exhibition game.' "I thanked him, of course, and went back to warming up. Well, I pitched the whole nine innings and beat them, two to zero. Lajoie got two hits off me, and I think George Stovall got a couple, but I shut them out--and I wasn't killed, either. "That night Charlie Carr called me over. 'You know,' he said, 'a funny thing just happened. Mr. Somers, the owner of the Cleveland club, just came over to my hotel room and wanted to buy you. He offered me three thousand five hundred dollars for your contract with the understanding that you'd stay here all season, to get more experience, and then you would join the Cleveland club next year.'