The girl behind the cigar counter welcomed him with a bright smile.  Archie was popular with all the employes of the Cosmopolis.

“’S a great day, Mr. Moffam!”

“One of the brightest and best,” Agreed Archie.  “Could you dig me out two, or possibly three, cigarettes of the usual description?  I shall want something to smoke at the ball-game.”

“You going to the ball-game?”

“Rather!  Wouldn’t miss it for a fortune.”

“No?”

“Absolutely no!  Not with jolly old Biddle pitching.”

The cigar-stand girl laughed amusedly.

“Is he pitching this afternoon?  Say, that feller’s a nut?  D’you know him?”

“Know him?  Well, I’ve seen him pitch and so forth.”

“I’ve got a girl friend who’s engaged to him!”

Archie looked at her with positive respect.  It would have been more dramatic, of course, if she had been engaged to the great man herself, but still the mere fact that she had a girl friend in that astounding position gave her a sort of halo.

“No, really!” he said.  “I say, by Jove, really!  Fancy that!”

“Yes, she’s engaged to him all right.  Been engaged close on a coupla months now.”

“I say!  That’s frightfully interesting!  Fearfully interesting, really!”

“It’s funny about that guy,” said the cigar-stand girl.  “He’s a nut!  The fellow who said there’s plenty of room at the top must have been thinking of Gus Biddle’s head!  He’s crazy about m’ girl friend, y’ know, and, whenever they have a fuss, it seems like he sort of flies right off the handle.”

“Goes in off the deep end, eh?”

“Yes, sir!  Loses what little sense he’s got.  Why, the last time him and m’ girl friend got to scrapping was when he was going on to Pittsburg to play, about a month ago.  He’d been out with her the day he left for there, and he had a grouch or something, and he started making low, sneaky cracks about her Uncle Sigsbee.  Well, m’ girl friend’s got a nice disposition, but she c’n get mad, and she just left him flat and told him all was over.  And he went off to Pittsburg, and, when he started in to pitch the opening game, he just couldn’t keep his mind on his job, and look what them assassins done to him!  Five runs in the first innings!  Yessir, he’s a nut all right!”

Archie was deeply concerned.  So this was the explanation of that mysterious disaster, that weird tragedy which had puzzled the sporting press from coast to coast.

“Good God!  Is he often taken like that?”

“Oh, he’s all right when he hasn’t had a fuss with m’ girl friend,” said the cigar-stand girl, indifferently.  Her interest in baseball was tepid.  Women are too often like this—­mere butterflies, with no concern for the deeper side of life.

“Yes, but I say!  What I mean to say, you know!  Are they pretty pally now?  The good old Dove of Peace flapping its little wings fairly briskly and all that?”