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Updated: May 13, 2025
The last neatly dressed business man was walking briskly from the pier. Silvey yawned listlessly. "Breakfast time, ain't it?" he asked. John's watch showed a quarter after eight. Slowly they reeled in the dripping lines, freed the hooks from all traces of water-soaked bait, and dismounted their rods. As they left the lake shore, the sun's rays became oppressive with heat.
Could he go? Of course, for the necessary dime was always forthcoming from his mother when an itinerant showman rented the corner dance hall for a one day performance. On the corner of Southern Avenue, he overtook Bill, who had stopped to play tops with an acquaintance. "Going?" he asked, as his chum glanced at the blue slip in his hand. "Bet your life," said Silvey decidedly.
John drew the needle from his coat lapel and wedged it carefully in the joint between his desk and the back of Olga's seat. A glance at Miss Brown found her watching Billy Silvey closely in the belief that he was the miscreant. The time for his crowning bit of persecution had arrived. Suddenly a nerve-wracking, ear-piercing vibration filled the room. Miss Brown's face went white with rage.
Silvey caught his chum's arm warningly. "No use of fishing beside him," he asserted. "Don't you know that, John? Brings bad luck to everyone 'cept himself, he does. I tried it one morning. He kept hauling them in, all the time, and I couldn't catch a thing." John shook his head skeptically as they moved over to the other side of the pier. "He does!" reiterated Silvey.
Returning a moment later from panic-stricken flight, the full meaning of the act dawned upon the boys and remorse overcame them. A hasty search for coin of the realm, a moment of consultation, and Silvey, boosted high on his comrades' shoulders, had rapped on the window ledge.
Silvey halted to pant a defiant "Ya-a-a, ya-a-a. Can't catch us. Can't catch us." John pulled his chum's arm impatiently and pointed to the vacant house just three lots south of Silvey's home. "Look," he whispered, suddenly cautious. "Some one's forgotten to close the front door tight. We can lock it from the inside and go up to the attic.
Only Red Brown had, by some miracle, come through the battle unscathed. "We won," said Silvey happily, as they stopped in front of his house. "Come on, now, all together!" They broke into the "Tigers'" exultant war cry, which is very much the same as that of the football team to which you belonged as a boy: Sis-boom-bah! Sis-boom-bah! "Tigers," "Tigers," Rah, rah, rah!
Red Brown and one or two of the fleeter spirits of the team raced from base to base, practicing a little trick of sliding which Red had noticed at a park baseball game, and Sid took his position as pitcher for a few minutes' erratic practice with Silvey. John left them for the night, wavering between confidence and despair as to the result of the morrow.
"It ain't much, ma'am, but it's all we got, and we didn't know the bottle was yours," he had murmured; and, all unwitting of the sardonic humor of the act, had passed in a check good for a drink at a near-by saloon. There were moments of reflective silence. "Isn't there something new we can do this year?" Silvey appealed to his fellow members.
The long-discussed secret code took a new lease on life, and cipher messages passed to the various corners of room ten with a frequency which drove Miss Brown nearly to distraction. That early April afternoon saw the reunion of the "Tigers" in the Silvey back yard. They viewed the dilapidated, weather-beaten club house with reawakened interest. Quoth John,
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