“Eyah! Eyah! Hughie, RAH-RAH.” A wiry red-haired boy about twenty-three years old swung lightly from the train with a big valise in his hand into a crowd of college boys in caps and heavy ulsters. They gathered round him at once, and while one crowd took charge of his valise, he was lifted on to the shoulders of a half dozen fellows and carried through the streets to his rooms in Elihu Dormitory. In a twinkling his rooms and the halls outside were blocked with the lads of Lowell who had come to welcome the most popular boy in school, Hughie Jenkins.

It was the day of the opening of the winter term of the University. Hughie Jenkins had been the successful manager for three years of the College Baseball team and on the Thanksgiving Day previous, Hughie as Captain of the Football Eleven, with the help of the other members of the team, had won the College Championship for the first time in five years.

The boys of Lowell University had never been very successful in football against their old rivals at Jefferson, and the fellows were so chock-full of enthusiasm over it that they had not yet had enough opportunity to satisfy it. As each of the members of the team had arrived he had been welcomed in much the same way, but the great welcome was, of course, given to “good old Hughie” as they called him, and now that he was with them again it was possible, taking the boys’ view of it, for the work of the University to go on.

As Captain Larke had said, “Hughie is entitled to all the credit we can give him. He has been a wonder at baseball because he has always kept the boys fighting hard to win, no matter what the score was, and we have won many a game just because we wanted to do our best for him, and the way he made us get out and win in the last few minutes of the big football game kind of shows that he knows how to put them over.”

“That’s right,” said Kirkpatrick, who was right end on the team, “if good old Hughie hadn’t put some of the fight back in us when that old score was 0 to 0 in the last five minutes of play, and then himself kicked that field goal from Jefferson’s twenty-five-yard line, we wouldn’t have won.”

“Well,” said Hughie, “this is fine all right, boys. We did win, didn’t we! and it’s very kind of you to try to give me all the credit, but if it hadn’t been for the other ten fellows on the team, I guess I couldn’t have done very much, and anyway it took eleven pretty good men to beat that team from Jefferson.”

Then, turning to Johnny Everson he said, “Gee, I wish the snow would melt. I’d like to find out what kind of new fellows we have who can play baseball.”

And that was just like Hughie. Here it was winter, with snow on the ground, and a month or two of cold weather still in sight. He had hardly got rested from the football campaign, and now he was wishing it was time to get out the bats, balls, and masks!

“It gets me,” said Delvin to Gibbie over in one corner, “how that old boy hustles and is thinking about all kinds of things all the time, but I guess that’s the way to win out.”

“In time of peace prepare for war,” said Hughie. “Now I am wondering right now whom we are going to get to take the place of old boy Penny on first (Fred Penny had been the sensation of the college world at the first bag), and who will take Johnny King’s place as catcher and will he be able to work that delayed throw trick with Johnny Everson and the shortstop? And by the way, who is going to take Joe Brinker’s place at short, besides the couple of other places that are vacant?

“Boys,” continued Hughie, “this is going to be my last year at school here. You fellows have helped me win the championship before. It’s all right about the football business, but this last year with you, we’ve simply got to have another winning nine. Let’s give a good old cheer for the football boys, and then let’s give another for the grand old game of ball, and then you go and tell all the fellows who can play ball that I want to see them in the cage next week, and tell all of them that think they can play ball to come, too. Sometimes some of these chaps who think they can’t do it turn out the best of all.”

And that evening when the boys got talking by themselves they forgot all about football, and the fellows who had been to school last year had to tell all over again about the wonderful stunts that Lowell boys had pulled off in the past, just as if most of them hadn’t heard them all before.

“Say, Johnny,” said Fred Larke, a Junior from Kansas and Captain of the Baseball Nine, to Johnny Everson, “I was trying to tell Robb here (Robb was from Georgia) how Johnny King and you and Joe Brinker figured out that delayed-throw-to-second trick that won that game from Princeville last year.”

“Well,” said Johnny, “it didn’t really win the game, you know, because we were ahead then, but it kept the other fellows from winning. You see, some one said to us in the visitors’ dressing room of Bailey Oval that Walker of the Princeville team was a slow thinker. ‘I have a new trick for fellows that can’t think quick,’ said King, the catcher, and he explained it to us so we would be on the job if the chance came. Sure enough it did.

“In the last half of the ninth inning of the game with Princeville College, the Lowell boys were one run to the good. Princeville College was at bat, of course.

“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.”

And so they talked and talked until long after time to be in bed, and told all the stories about the great Lowell clubs of the past, the great pitchers, the catchers and the fielders; and the fellows called it the first meeting of the Hot Stove League of Lowell University 19—. This talking League lasted through part of February, by which time the freshies who had done wonders on the high-school teams at home, and who had come to Lowell with high hopes of making the team, had a pretty good idea of the kind of enthusiasm and loyalty and, most important, the hard work they would have to show to get on the team at Lowell.

The night of Hughie Jenkins’ return a boyish-looking chap, who had come all the way from California to Lowell University, only five months before, wrote a long letter to his folks back home, and among other things he said the boys had begun to talk baseball, and he was going to try to be on the team and also that he was going to try for the position of pitcher. Further, that he was going to try for one of the Jerry Harriman Prizes. His name was Case.