“Walker, the first man up, had gotten to first on a hit and reached second on a sacrifice and he was the lad they said didn’t think quick. This was just the thing we figured might happen. King had said, ‘If that fellow gets on second, I can pull off this new trick, which I call the delayed throw. Let Joe cover the bag and Johnny stall.’ On the first ball pitched, this Walker took a big lead off second, and Brinker covered the bag, King motioned quick as if to throw, and I stood still. Walker first started back toward second, but when he saw that King didn’t throw he slowed down. Brinker, walking back to his place at short, said to Walker, ‘We’d have got you that time, old boy, if King had thrown the ball.’ For just one fatal moment Walker turned around to answer Brinker’s remark and in that instant King threw the ball to me as I hustled for the bag. Of course, I caught it and jabbed it against the runner and before he knew how it was done, he was out. “Of course you couldn’t work that on a real live player, but we won the game on that play because the next batter drove out a long single on which Walker could have scored. Looking at it one way, it was won in the dressing room because that’s where we fixed up the scheme.” “It pays to keep thinking about the game all the time, doesn’t it?” commented Larke. That brought up the other story of another game with Biltmore University a couple of years before which Lowell lost, and Everson had to tell that, too. “I wasn’t there,” said Everson, “because it was two years ago, which was before my time, and there was a whole lot of luck about it, too, but it was this way. There were three on bases and Merry, our mighty slugger, at bat with two out. Score was 3 to 0 against us and it was our last half of the ninth, too; Merry hit the first ball pitched for a homer over the right field fence, and four runs would have scored, only for little Willie Keefer, right fielder for Biltmore, who was playing well out toward the fence. “The grounds were down by the railroad and right field was down hill and rough. Inside, the fence sloped at an angle of 65 degrees, being straight on the outside and covered with signs. Willie started with the crack of the bat, leaped upon the slope of the fence and started to run along it, going higher and higher and just as the ball was going over his head, straight as a bullet, he put up his right hand, and caught the ball fairly; then Willie went over the fence with the ball in his mitt, rolling over in the dirt. “Willie climbed back over the fence, and the runs didn’t count because while the umpire couldn’t see it plainly, our fellows in the right bleachers could see Willie all the time and they were, of course, square enough to say that the ball was fairly caught, even if it did lose the game for us.”