Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/71

70 have agreed that Silent was answering their call at last. As it was, they could only stare and wonder.

When we again trailed into the dugout we found the chief in earnest consultation with Dr. Barrett, the club physician. The word was spread that Andy be left alone, and he was.

He came shuffling off the field with hanging head and settled down into a listless attitude at one end of the bench. Dr. Barrett studied his drooping figure for a moment or two and finally shook his head. So did we all. If the dead can come back in any form, Silent Smith was sitting there in his accustomed place radiating as much gloom as he ever had.

But the most unnatural twist of the whole affair was still in the making.

Pudgy Ayres lined a pretty single into right to start our half of the ninth and the crowd started pulling for us at last. Tommy Leech pushed Pudgy around with a well-placed bunt and beat out the throw to first. Both of them advanced a bag when Marty McGowan walked and the bases were full.

All that we needed now was someone with a punch—someone who could uncork a drive that would sweep the bays and tie the count at three all.

Andy was the next man up and everybody was looking for a pinch-hitter. With victory at stake, it would not do to take a chance on the hitless wonder, but the chief must have been playing a hunch. He never said a word when Andy climbed out of the pit and surveyed the bat rack with melancholy eyes.

Mine was the only black stick in the lot, and Andy picked it up.

Amid a silence as dead as a graveyard, he dragged the bat up to the plate. Every movement he made was followed by the crowd with straining eyes and bated breath. The moment was fraught with something beyond their knowledge, and the mystery of the thing held them fascinated.

A newspaper photographer took up his stand along the foul line and focused his camera on Andy as he entered the box: If Andy saw him he made no sign. His eyes were glued to the ground. Dolefully he sidled around to the left of the plate, grasped his bat with a weary effort and stood waiting.

Blondy Vance, the opposing slabsman, was visibly shaken. Andy had always been a right-handed batter, and to see him fall into that woeful, left-handed stance with a big, black bat was like looking at a ghost. For a moment Blondy stared and Andy gazed back.

The umpire brought Blondy back to earth and he finally started his wind-up. That was his last pitching effort of the season. The ball went sailing toward the plate with absolutely nothing on it. Andy connected with a resounding crash, and three runs came trailing in. The score was tied while Andy, the winning run was rounding third.

He staggered the distance between third and home. His feet were dragging as if loaded with lead. He managed to make the plate with the deciding tally, and then collapsed like an empty sack.

It was fully a half hour before Andy recovered and started jabbering away like the lad we knew. The doctor took him in hand, and Andy was puzzled over the discovery that he himself had finished the game. His last recollection was that of being hit by a batted ball.

I might add that a picture of Andy starting the ball on that home run journey appeared in the Daily Mail issued on September 11, 1912, and created much discussion throughout the country. While somewhat blurry, Andy's face is sufficiently clear to be identified. Covering his face like a veil is a misty something which closely resembles the melancholy features of Silent Smith.

And Silent Smith was dead!



DINOSAURS—the colossal reptile creatures of a prehistoric era—laid eggs five or six inches long. And they had nests like any gentle domestic fowl of today. The early mammalian beasts of Asia and America were kin and roamed across the two continents on the land bridge that joined them in those remote times.

These are some of the discoveries announced by the third Asiastic expedition of the American Museum of Natural History on its return after five months on the Mongolian plains.

One of the leaders of the expedition, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the paleontologist, said the fossil beds found in Mongolia were the largest known to science. For the first time, he explained, explorers had at their disposal terrestrial deposite of enormous extent, still preserved in their pristine grandeur, thus enabling the reconstruction of much of the life in the middle period of the reptilian age.

The adventurers of science returned with the opinion that they had proved the Mongolian plateau to have been the center of dispersion of the most ancient animals traced. Dr. Osborn and Roy Chapman Andrews, the naturalist, consider a spectacular feature of their discoveries the twenty-five fossilized dinosaur eggs which they found in several nests in sedimentary strata among the skeletons of medium sized dinosaurs of a species known as protoceratops andrewsis, These are the first dinosaur eggs to be revealed to science, according to members of the expedition, who said that hitherto it had not been known that the dinosaur laid eggs. The eggs are elliptical, five to six inches in length, their shells now covered with a buff-colored coating. Their age is estimated at 10,000,000 years.

The explorers brought out seventy-two skulls and twelve complete skeletons of these "terrible lizards," as the two Greek words forming the terms dinosaur describe them.

The expedition also found numerous remains of mammals, principally of a giant rhinoceros-like beast which is said to prove kinship among the earliest fauna of Asia arid America. The scientists explained that a land bridge joined the continents in those dim yesterdays.