A sudden chill gripped Archie.  So engrossed had he been with, his mission that it had never occurred to him that the love-lorn pitcher might have taken it into his head to follow the girl as well in the hope of putting in a word for himself.  Yet such apparently had been the case.  Well, this had definitely torn it.  Two loving hearts were united again in complete reconciliation, but a fat lot of good that was.  It would be days before the misguided Looney Biddle would be able to pitch with a hand like that.  It looked like a ham already, and was still swelling.  Probably the wrist was sprained.  For at least a week the greatest left-handed pitcher of his time would be about as much use to the Giants in any professional capacity as a cold in the head.  And on that crippled hand depended the fate of all the money Archie had in the world.  He wished now that he had not thwarted the fellow’s simple enthusiasm.  To have had his head knocked forcibly through a brick wall would not have been pleasant, but the ultimate outcome would not have been as unpleasant as this.  With a heavy heart Archie prepared to withdraw, to be alone with his sorrow.

At this moment, however, the Girl Friend, releasing her wounded lover, made a sudden dash for him, with the plainest intention of blotting him from the earth.

“No, I say!  Really!” said Archie, bounding backwards.  “I mean to say!”

In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.  It was the extreme ragged, outside edge of the limit.  To brawl with a fellow-man in a public street had been bad, but to be brawled with by a girl—­the shot was not on the board.  Absolutely not on the board.  There was only one thing to be done.  It was dashed undignified, no doubt, for a fellow to pick up the old waukeesis and leg it in the face of the enemy, but there was no other course.  Archie started to run; and, as he did so, one of the loafers made the mistake of gripping him by the collar of his coat.

“I got him!” observed the loafer.-There is a time for all things.  This was essentially not the time for anyone of the male sex to grip the collar of Archie’s coat.  If a syndicate of Dempsey, Carpentier, and one of the Zoo gorillas had endeavoured to stay his progress at that moment, they would have had reason to consider it a rash move.  Archie wanted to be elsewhere, and the blood of generations of Moffams, many of whom had swung a wicked axe in the free-for-all mix-ups of the Middle Ages, boiled within him at any attempt to revise his plans.  There was a good deal of the loafer, but it was all soft.  Releasing his hold when Archie’s heel took him shrewdly on the shin, he received a nasty punch in what would have been the middle of his waistcoat if he had worn one, uttered a gurgling bleat like a wounded sheep, and collapsed against the wall.  Archie, with a torn coat, rounded the corner, and sprinted down Ninth Avenue.