Keystone Kids Read Free Page A

Field in New York, with the sun rising on the horizon. A tall man who introduced himself as Bill Hanson, the club secretary, had met them there. Then breakfast at the hotel—fruit juice and cereal, coffee and eggs and bacon, wheat cakes, too, all you could eat. Next the ballpark, with the players arriving for the days doubleheader against the Giants, and Ginger Crane, the shortstop and manager, famous throughout baseball, who entered looking more like a Broadway actor or a business executive than a ballplayer. Finally the Dodger monkey suits, and the practice for a couple of hours with dozens of photographers taking their pictures, and Bob out there making one of those impossible single-handed stabs. Last of all, the doubleheader they had watched from the bench.
    All this in twenty-four hours. No, in a thousand hours. Now they were the Russell boys of the Dodgers, leaving with the team to make the last western trip of the season. It was ages since they’d sat together in Mrs. Hampton’s boarding-house on McGavock Street where the stew for supper was gone whenever the game lasted more than nine innings. A thousand hours had passed since then.
    The station in New York was a cavern, not a station. It was bigger far than anything they could imagine, yet jammed with Sunday evening travelers. In the confusion they became separated from the team. Some bad moments followed. Whichever way they looked were strange faces, everywhere strange faces, people hurrying for trains or from trains, no one they had ever seen.
    Say! Suppose we lost the club for good, suppose we missed that train! Why, we’d get shot back to Nashville pronto.
    Silently they wandered through big dome-shaped areas, into waiting rooms, edging through the crowd into telephone rooms, baggage rooms, searching vainly for someone they recognized. No team anywhere! Finally Spike went up to a stationmaster in uniform. The official looked at them curiously but there was no excitement in his voice.
    “The Dodgers? You boys with the Dodgers? They’re doing all right these days, aren’t they?” Slowly he drew a long black-covered book from his coat pocket and consulted it. “I think they’re on 24. That’s right. They’re on the American, platform 24, over there. Don’t go down the main entrance where that crowd is. Go over opposite; the ballclubs go down the back way.”
    Spike saw them then across the crowded space as they went over. The tanned, self-assured athletes were surrounded by a dozen women. Many of the players were dressed in silk sports shirts, open at the neck, and slacks; they wore no coats and had no baggage. Spike and Bob felt strangely out of place in their best suits with neckties on, and bags in their hands. Spike recognized one or two of the men: Razzle Nugent, the tall pitcher, and the swarthy outfielder, Karl Case, and Crane, the manager. Finally they discovered the secretary. He glanced at a slip of paper in his hand.
    “Here you are! The Russell boys... you boys are H in FB-2.” He turned away.
    Now what did that mean?
    “Beg your pardon, sir.”
    “H in FB-2. Room H in car FB-2. Go down those steps, right here...”
    “Sir, how ’bout the tickets? We ain’t got our tickets yet.”
    He smiled. “You boys won’t need any tickets. Just hop aboard. I’ll take care of everything.” They walked down the steps to a platform with a long train beside it. Halfway down was a pile of baggage, rows of expensive leather suitcases and handbags, the pile guarded by an elderly man who might have been a banker. He knew them even if they didn’t know him.
    “Hullo there, boys. You’re in FB-2. Up the end of the platform. That all the stuff you got with you? I wish the others traveled light, too.”
    “Yessir, thank you, sir.” Spike then recognized him as the locker room attendant who had fitted them out with their monkey suits, a man the players all addressed as Chiselbeak. For a second he wished they had something more than their two cloth