He stared until the group left the table.  He could actually have touched the Pitcher as he passed.  Would wonders never cease?

Two men in uniform helped him into the big red car again, tenderly, as if he were fragile.  He had meant to return to the garage, but now he saw the more dignified way was to stop at his own house.  Further, Paul should take him to the office in the morning and call for him at four-thirty again.  He wouldn’t be afraid to ride in the red car even in daylight now.  Sitting there not twenty feet from that Pitcher!

“Eight o’clock in the morning,” he said curtly to Paul as he descended.  And Paul touched his leather cap respectfully as the car moved off.

Cassidy lounged near in shirt sleeves.

“I see three was kilt-up in wan yistaday in th’ Bur-ronx,” said Cassidy interestedly.

“Good thing for the tired business man, though,” said Bean, yawning in a bored way.  “And that fellow of mine is careful.”

Then his seeming boredom vanished.

“Say, you can’t guess who I saw just now.  Close to him as I am to you this minute—­”

* * * * *

Solitary in the big red car, descending the crowded lanes of the city the next morning, Bean’s sensations were conceivably those that had been Ram-tah’s at the zenith of his power.  There was the fragrant and cherished memory of the Greatest Pitcher, and a car to ride solitary in that simply blared the common herd from before it.  People in street-cars looked enviously out at him.  He lolled urbanely, with a large public manner.  When you were a king you behaved like one, and the world knelt to you.  Great pitchers sitting under the same roof with you; red motor-cars; fumed oak dining-rooms; flappers; brokers; shares.  He wished he had thought to chew an unlighted cigar in this resplendent chariot.  There seemed to be almost a public demand for it.  Certain things were expected of a man!

“Be here at four-thirty,” he directed.

And Paul, his fellow, glancing up along the twenty-two stories of the office building, was impressed.  He considered it probable that the bored young man owned this building.  “The guys that have gits!” thought Paul.

Bean was preposterously working once more, playing the part of a cog on the wheel.  Another day, it seemed, of that grotesque nonsense, even after the world’s Greatest Pitcher had sat not twenty feet from him the night before, eating raspberry ice.  But events could not long endure that strain.  Before the day was over Breede would undoubtedly “fire” him, with two or three badly chosen words; actually go through the form of discharging a man who had once ruled all Egypt with a kindly but an iron hand!