Then they went down to the bank and had the check cashed and Hal counted out one hundred and twenty-five dollars which he gave to Hans who immediately put his in the bank again, to his own credit, while Hal rolled his up, put a rubber band around it and stuffed it in his trousers’ pocket. CHAPTER XIV PREPARATIONS AT THE RIVAL COLLEGE The progress of the nine was quite satisfactory to Hughie and the coaches and they began to feel as though they had the championship again in their inside pockets, and they were right in thinking so, because never before in all the ball teams put together, in college or out, had there been so many individual stars on any one team. “This,” said Hughie, talking with Penny who had been down for a week, “has been the greatest luck that any baseball manager ever had, to find himself at the beginning of the training season with five of the most important positions of the team vacant and then to discover among the freshmen, a bunch of fellows like Case, Hagner, Robb, Talkington and Radams who make good right away. Of course, I’d not tell them so to their faces, but those fellows are playing their positions better than any fellows who ever played those corners before. They ought to be world’s champions. Those boys, especially when steadied by the more experienced bunch we have left, Everson, Larke, Gibbs, Black and Delvin, ought to beat any team in the world.” “They haven’t been beaten yet,” said Everson, who just came up, “and I don’t think we are going to be licked this year. Did you ever see such a bunch of stars?” “If Jefferson College has anything like our kind of luck in discovering stars among the freshmen, there will be the hottest series of ball games that ever was played anywhere between two teams,” said Penny. “It’s hardly possible that Jefferson should have anything like the same kind of luck,” remarked Hughie. Meantime, however, some very similar talk was going on at Jefferson. “They licked us at football this year all right and I still think it was mostly luck that they did,” said Captain and Manager Frank Church to his coaches and captains about this same time, “but we’ve got them this year on the ball game. Won’t Lowell be surprised though when we turn ’em inside out on the diamond.” “Did you ever know of anybody else having the kind of baseball luck we have had this year?” asked Tommy Beach, center fielder on the Jefferson team and good friend of Church’s. “No,” said Church, “I’ve seen the bad luck come in bunches often before, such as having a half dozen of the team put out of the game on account of injuries in a day, but no one ever had the good luck we have had in picking out fine kids from a bunch of freshmen recruits, and have them develop into stars after the few games we have played.”