Kid from Tomkinsville Read Free

money to buy shoes in Montpelier, Vermont.”
    “Yeah. You’re a scrapper all right. That Gas House Gang, they’re all scrappers. They sure weren’t a bunch of sissies. Great gang, those boys.”
    “Scrapping wins pennants. I’d like this team to be scrappers. To be a hustling ballclub, no lead in their tails. We got too many nice boys. Too much dead wood. Old Caswell and Jennison and Dave Leonard. Been in the League almost twenty years, he has. I want youngsters. Like this-here-now Kid from Tomkinsville. They tell me he’ll be a ballplayer one of these days... maybe....” He added the last word as an afterthought. When you’ve been up and around a few years in baseball and seen a few of them come and go, when you’ve watched kids with big reputations in the minors go to pieces for no reason at all with a big-league club, well, you get sort of cautious.
    In the coach behind the baggage car in front of the train, the Kid from Tomkinsville stretched his legs for the twentieth time in an hour. The dog-eared and dirty copy of Detective Stories fell to the ground and stayed there because he had read it through, some stories twice over. He ached everywhere. Sleeping in a day coach does things to you. No matter how you sit or what position you take, you wake up sore and weary. Your neck is stiff. The jolting and rocking of the train tightens your leg muscles. It makes your hips and thighs ache. The thick, unchanged air contracts your throat and gives you a heavy feeling in your head, the continual dust irritates your nasal passages. Outside the warm afternoon sunshine beat through dingy window panes into the stuffy interior of the car. They had left Washington the previous night in a blizzard, but the sun was shining at Jacksonville in the morning. It was a pleasant, warm, and welcome sun. Now it was hot and much less welcome. A long flat road wound beside the track with groves of pine trees beyond. Slowly a big blue car came into sight, and he envied the two bareheaded men sitting in the front. It was an expensive cabriolet with the top back, and suitcases and golf bags piled high in the rear. A couple of millionaires, probably, going south for a winter vacation. Some folks had all the luck. Now the car swerved close to the train, then it veered away as the road shifted, but always it moved gently ahead until finally it pulled out of sight.
    Some day he’d have a car like that. A big shiny, blue-painted car, and take Grandma for a ride in it with the top back. Some day, when he was a successful ballplayer.

2
    F UNNY HOW A CHAP can feel lonely even in a crowd.
    The crowd made him feel more lonely than ever. Because those men in the roof garden at breakfast didn’t seem like ballplayers, not at least the kind he knew, but older men. They were business men, well-dressed fellows who were evidently prospering in a profession that they liked. They wore curious costumes—coats that didn’t match their gray trousers and pointed tan shoes with white tips. Everyone seemed to know everyone else; they called each other by their first names, and jokes and laughter floated across the tables as they looked at the menu with practiced glances, ordered what they wanted, and addressed the waitress as “Sweetmeat.” It made him feel terribly alone. He sat at a table unoccupied save for his roommate, a boy with big open brown eyes who like himself sat in silence, knowing no one.
    Down in the lobby after breakfast it was worse. While he sat silently in a big chair, men kept coming downstairs, greeting old friends, calling in delight as they found a pal, laughing and talking, perfectly at ease, with no worries or fears. He was not only unhappy, he was afraid, and his loneliness accentuated his fright. There was the fear of not making good, of having to return home without a job as everyone in Tomkinsville had predicted. Worst of all, there was the worry as to whether he’d ever be able to return. Suppose he couldn’t make the grade?