Suddenly she clutched his shoulders with her slender hands. "It's all wrong!" she cried. "You've given up the best that was in you for the Blue Stockings. You've done the work of two pitchers. They won't let you go now. Even if your arm is bad at the beginning of the season, they'll keep you on and give you a chance to get it back into condition." "Old Jack Kennedy would, but I have my doubts about any other manager." "You don't mean that they'd let you go outright, just drop you?" "Oh, it's possible they'd try to sell me or trade me. If they could work me off on to some one who wasn't wise, probably they'd do it. That's not reckoning on Weegman. He's so sore and vindictive that he may spread the report that I've pitched my wing off. I fancy he wouldn't care a rap if that did lose Collier the selling price that could be got for me." "Oh, I just hate to hear you talk about being traded or sold! It doesn't sound as if you were a human being and this a free country. Cattle are traded and sold." "Cattle and ball players." "It's wrong! Isn't there any way--" "The Federals are showing the way." "Your sympathy's with them. You're not bound to the Blue Stockings; you're still your own free agent." "Under the circumstances what would you have me do?" At last he had asked her advice. Now she could speak. She did so eagerly. "Accept the offer the Federals have made you." "My dear," he said, "would you have me do that, with my own mind in doubt as to whether or not I was worth a dollar to them? Would you have me take the ten thousand I could get, knowing all the time that they might be paying it for a has-been who wasn't worth ten cents? Would that be honest?" "You can be honest, then," she hurriedly declared. "No one knows for a certainty, not even yourself, that you can't come back to your old form. You can go to the manager and tell him the truth about yourself. Can't you do that?" "And then what? Probably he wouldn't want me after that at any price." "You can make a fair bargain with him. You can have it put in the contract that you are to get that money if you do come back and make good as a pitcher." Lefty laughed. "I think it would be the first time on record that a ball player ever went to a manager who was eager to sign him up, and made such a proposition. It would be honest, Janet; but if the manager believed me, if he saw I was serious, do you fancy he'd feel like coming across with the first year's salary in advance and the bonus? You see I can't raise the money I need, and be honest." She wrung her hands and came back to the first question that had leaped from her lips: "What can you do?" "I don't think I'll make any decisive move until I find out what sort of queer business is going on in the Blue Stockings camp. I could get money through Kennedy if he were coming back. Everything is up in the air." "How can you find out, away down here? You're too far away from the places where things are doing."