Mike

“This is our star.  You wait till he gets at us to-day.  Saunders is our only bowler, and Mike’s been brought up on Saunders.  You’d better win the toss if you want a chance of getting a knock and lifting your average out of the minuses.”

“I have won the toss,” said the other with dignity.  “Do you think I don’t know the elementary duties of a captain?”

The school went out to field with mixed feelings.  The wicket was hard and true, which would have made it pleasant to be going in first.  On the other hand, they would feel decidedly better and fitter for centuries after the game had been in progress an hour or so.  Burgess was glad as a private individual, sorry as a captain.  For himself, the sooner he got hold of the ball and began to bowl the better he liked it.  As a captain, he realised that a side with Joe Jackson on it, not to mention the other first-class men, was not a side to which he would have preferred to give away an advantage.  Mike was feeling that by no possibility could he hold the simplest catch, and hoping that nothing would come his way.  Bob, conscious of being an uncertain field, was feeling just the same.

The M.C.C. opened with Joe and a man in an Oxford Authentic cap.  The beginning of the game was quiet.  Burgess’s yorker was nearly too much for the latter in the first over, but he contrived to chop it away, and the pair gradually settled down.  At twenty, Joe began to open his shoulders.  Twenty became forty with disturbing swiftness, and Burgess tried a change of bowling.

It seemed for one instant as if the move had been a success, for Joe, still taking risks, tried to late-cut a rising ball, and snicked it straight into Bob’s hands at second slip.  It was the easiest of slip-catches, but Bob fumbled it, dropped it, almost held it a second time, and finally let it fall miserably to the ground.  It was a moment too painful for words.  He rolled the ball back to the bowler in silence.

One of those weary periods followed when the batsman’s defence seems to the fieldsmen absolutely impregnable.  There was a sickening inevitableness in the way in which every ball was played with the very centre of the bat.  And, as usual, just when things seemed most hopeless, relief came.  The Authentic, getting in front of his wicket, to pull one of the simplest long-hops ever seen on a cricket field, missed it, and was l.b.w.  And the next ball upset the newcomer’s leg stump.

The school revived.  Bowlers and field were infused with a new life.  Another wicket—­two stumps knocked out of the ground by Burgess—­helped the thing on.  When the bell rang for the end of morning school, five wickets were down for a hundred and thirteen.

But from the end of school till lunch things went very wrong indeed.  Joe was still in at one end, invincible; and at the other was the great wicket-keeper.  And the pair of them suddenly began to force the pace till the bowling was in a tangled knot.  Four after four, all round the wicket, with never a chance or a mishit to vary the monotony.  Two hundred went up, and two hundred and fifty.  Then Joe reached his century, and was stumped next ball.  Then came lunch.

The rest of the innings was like the gentle rain after the thunderstorm.  Runs came with fair regularity, but wickets fell at intervals, and when the wicket-keeper was run out at length for a lively sixty-three, the end was very near.  Saunders, coming in last, hit two boundaries, and was then caught by Mike.  His second hit had just lifted the M.C.C. total over the three hundred.

Three hundred is a score that takes some making on any ground, but on a fine day it was not an unusual total for the Wrykyn eleven.  Some years before, against Ripton, they had run up four hundred and sixteen; and only last season had massacred a very weak team of Old Wrykynians with a score that only just missed the fourth hundred.

Unfortunately, on the present occasion, there was scarcely time, unless the bowling happened to get completely collared, to make the runs.  It was a quarter to four when the innings began, and stumps were to be drawn at a quarter to seven.  A hundred an hour is quick work.

Burgess, however, was optimistic, as usual.  “Better have a go for them,” he said to Berridge and Marsh, the school first pair.

Following out this courageous advice, Berridge, after hitting three boundaries in his first two overs, was stumped half-way through the third.

After this, things settled down.  Morris, the first-wicket man, was a thoroughly sound bat, a little on the slow side, but exceedingly hard to shift.  He and Marsh proceeded to play themselves in, until it looked as if they were likely to stay till the drawing of stumps.