The boys came rushing back for the final lap of the school year. Already on the train most of them had heard the startling news: "Carle isn't going to pitch! Carle has left school!" These brief statements of undeniable truth were not all they heard; there were additions through wild rumors and bold surmises transformed to positive facts in the repeating: Carle left because he wasn't allowed to play ball; Carle was proved a professional and had to go; Carle was fired because he left town without permission, because he cut chapel too often, because he didn't do any work, because he had a row with a teacher, because he was a scholarship man and smoked, because he had been drinking, because he played poker. For two whole days Owen was kept busy denying these rumors. Then the tongues gradually ceased to wag; and Carle faded ingloriously away into the limbo of the suddenly departed, whose names when mentioned in the _Seatonian_ always bear the significant "ex" before the numeral of the class which once claimed them. With the returning boys, to Poole's great relief, came the baseball coach, Mr. Lyford. The ground on the upper campus was already hard enough for practice; the regular diamond was drying. Cutting though the winds and raw and chill the atmosphere, Rob yet found it an immense relief to escape from the confining walls of the little cage into the open, where there was room to throw, and honest, abundant daylight. He had never taken kindly to the practice in the cage. When he tried to bat there, he had always been awkwardly conscious of those close lines of netted wall pressing upon him, of the low ceiling, of the treacherous shadows, of the impossibility of driving the ball anywhere, of the whole sham of the situation compared with the open field, where the sunlight pours down through fifty miles of atmosphere, and the wide horizon challenges the batsman to his hardest drive. Perhaps this feeling was responsible for his lack of success as a cage batsman; perhaps he hated the cage because he couldn't hit there. At any rate, the facts were connected, and he welcomed his release with the heartiness of the landlubber when, after his first voyage, he exchanges the narrow, malodorous, unsteady forecastle for solid, familiar earth.