“Huh!” remarked one North boy.  “You told us, Martin, that you’d prove to us the benefit of having a real captain for a nine.  Why didn’t you?”

“Martin, you’re all wind,” growled another keenly disappointed North.  “You talked a lot about what you’d do with the nine—–­and what have you done?  Left us the boobies of the league.  We’re the winners of the leather medal.”

“Why didn’t you play yourself, then?” snarled Hi.

“I wish I had.  But we Norths were fooled by the talk you gave us about how baseball really ought to be played and managed.  You’re the school’s mascot, you are, Hi Martin.  Not!”

In the meantime Dick Prescott was being surrounded by anxious Central Grammar boys.

“Dick,” said one of them, while others listened eagerly, “you beat the Norths.  But you didn’t give them any such drubbing as the Souths did to-day.  Are they a better nine than ours?”

“No,” Prescott answered promptly.

“Yet they whipped the Norths worse than we did.  Can we down the Souths?”

“Yes,” nodded Prescott.

“Why can we?”

“For the simplest reason in the world, Tolman.  We’ve got to.  Isn’t that a fine reason?”

“It sounds fine,” remarked another boy doubtfully.  “But can you whip another crowd just because you want to?”

“If you want to badly enough,” Dick smiled.

“Hm!  I’ll be surer about that when I see it done.”

“It’ll happen next Friday afternoon, if rain doesn’t call the game,” Prescott promised.

“What do you say to that, Darrin?” demanded another Central boy.

“Just what Dick said.”

“What’s your word, Tom!”

“You heard what our captain said,” Reade laughed.  “I always follow orders.  If Dick Prescott tells me to pile up seven runs against the Souths I’m going to do it.”

“I hope you do,” murmured another boy.  “Yet it seems against us—–­after the way we saw the Souths play to-day.”

“Or rather,” added Dick quietly, “the way the North Grammars didn’t play.  They’d have put up a lot better game if their captain hadn’t lost his nerve and his head.”

As the Central Grammar boys left, most of them in one crowd, there was a rather general feeling that Dick was just a bit too confident.  Or, was he simply “putting it on,” in order to bolster up the courage of his players?

Dick Prescott, at least, was qualified to know what he really expected.  He really was confident of victory in the game that should decide the league championship.

“If you feel that you can’t be beaten, and won’t be beaten, but that you’ve got to win and are going to win, then that’s more than half the points of a game won in advance,” he told his chums.  “Fellows, in baseball or anything else, we won’t say die, either now or at any later time in life.  We’ll make it our rule to ride right over anything that gets in our way.  That way we can’t know defeat.”