Page:Teeftallow-1926.djvu/82

MR. DITMAS might have spared himself any effort in advertising his proposed Sunday baseball, for the news, once hinted, spread over the village with the swiftness of a fire alarm. A defensive reaction set up at once. The merchants discussed the new departure with confused disapproval. Some of them were afraid something would happen to their village if they played ball on Sunday, a storm, a fire . . . a bolt from Heaven.

The garage itself was undecided on the point. The boys who were to play this unholy game shuffled about, spat dubiously upon the cement floor, and would ask each other, "Air you goin' to play, Jim?" "I'm goin' to do what the rest of you do." It turned out that everyone, Abner included, was going to do what the rest did. Tug Beavers alone stood out against this flaccid unanimity. He swore he would throw his influence in the right direction no matter what he did himself. This was interpreted to be anti-baseball propaganda.

While the men of Irontown were vague and inarticulate on the point, the women were clear-cut. High-pitched denunciations of Sunday baseball were flung across backyard fences. The telephone wires buzzed with the outrage. For example, the bell tinkled in the home of a Mrs. Roxie Biggers, who before her marriage was a Northcutt. She was a tall, thin, humpbacked woman with a thin, hawklike face, a compressed mouth, a thin, humped nose with the lobes cut in the high triangles of temper and wilfulness. This good woman's husband, Mr. Timothy Biggers, a druggist, had not made a suggestion in his home since