“Wow! wow! wow!” came again from O’Mora. “What do you think of that? Better use your other hand, Merriwell. You can’t find the pan with your left.”
“Everybody run!” shouted Marone. “Score on the first passed ball!”
“There won’t be any,” muttered Buckhart, as he resumed his position behind the bat and gave Dick a signal.
The next ball pitched by Dick came over the plate. It looked good to the batter, but he simply popped up an easy fly that was taken by Otis Fitch.
“Don’t try to kill the ball!” shouted Marone. “Don’t try to knock the cover off! You can all hit it!”
“Sure you can hit it,” said Buckhart, in a low tone; “but hitting it safe is what counts.”
When Dick had fooled the next batter with two elusive benders, it began to look as if hitting the ball was not such an easy thing, after all. Forced into a corner, the batter finally lifted a high foul, which Buckhart got under and gathered in.
“That’s two, partner,” laughed the Texan, as he tossed the ball to Dick. “Why, they couldn’t hit you safely if you pitched with your feet.”
“Get in there, now,” urged Marone, as O’Mora trotted to the plate. “A little single is all we want. A little safety is the goods. You know where to put it, Mat.”
But suddenly Dick bored over a fast one, and O’Mora literally threw himself off his feet in the effort to get against it.
“Wow! wow! wow!” he yapped, as he picked himself up. “Where’d you get that speed, Merriwell? How can you do it with your little left? Be gentle! be gentle! Give me a chance to look at the ball when it comes over.”
He lobbed up a slow one, and O’Mora nearly broke his back reaching out to hit the ball before it was anywhere near the plate.
Marone snapped at the batter, and O’Mora shook his head with a comical look of dismay.
“I won’t strike out!” he muttered to himself. But that was precisely what he did do. Dick worked with all the craft at his command, and finally led O’Mora into reaching for a nasty curve which he could not touch.
Yale came to bat in the last of the ninth, with the score four to two against them.
“We’ve got to have two to tie and three to win,” said Dick cheerfully. “Here’s where we get them.”
But the wrong end of the batting list was up. Jones was to be followed by Spratt, Bigelow, and Fitch, the three weakest hitters on the team.