Free Highpockets by John R. Tunis Page A

night.”
    He paused just to let this fact sink in. Still Dean was unimpressed. 823,365 votes, playing in the All-Star his first season in the majors, yet to this solemn-faced boy he was just another tiresome adult asking the same stuffy questions. What school d’you go to? What grade you in? What d’you study? Something was wrong. For most kids in Brooklyn this would be a big moment, perhaps the biggest moment of their lives, an event they’d talk about in school for years. Yet the youngster in the bed was bored. Perhaps unconsciously Highpockets had pictured himself as the home run king, visiting kids in the hospital and leaving them cheered and encouraged merely by his presence. Only things somehow weren’t working out that way.
    Highpockets felt uncomfortable. He was glad when a nurse entered with a glass of orange juice. The boy took it without a word, and glanced at the ballplayer across the edge of the glass with wide, curious eyes.
    “Well, s’long. Anything you want ... anything you’d like ... you need?” His gaze wandered again toward the table and his unopened books stacked there.
    The boy shook his head and said nothing.
    “O.K. I’ll be back here the first of the week. Get yerself well and outa this-here hospital before I come back, y’understand?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, g’by now.”
    “G’by.”
    The boy still looked at him over the rim of the glass as he left. Highpockets walked down the corridor mopping his forehead.
    Say! Maybe those sportswriters don’t have such a soft touch after all.

Chapter 11
    W HEN YOU’RE FREE and loose and nothing depends on it, that’s when you can really play baseball. At the start of the afternoon, the parishioners in the right field bleachers at Crosley Field jeered and poured abuse, as the crowds did everywhere all over the circuit whenever Highpockets first took his place at bat or in the outer garden. He reacted to their noise by belting one into the stands against Seaman McNutt of the Yanks his first time at bat. He was passed in the fourth, and when he came up in the seventh the tone of the crowd had changed. This time he hit a terrific clout into the stands in right, known as “Giles’ Picnic Grounds.” Cincinnati sportswriters said a blow like that hadn’t been hit there since the days of Babe Ruth.
    Highpockets’ first thought was to call the hospital as soon as he reached New York. From the start there was something strange about that telephone call: the long silences, the way everyone from the main operator to the head nurse kept asking his name and who he was and putting him off and passing him along to someone else. Except for the fact that the youngster was still hospitalized, he couldn’t get a lot of information. Suddenly a supervisor of some sort came on the wire.
    “Hold on a minute, please. Dr. Jansen is in the hospital now. I’ll let you talk with him.” Click-click, went the operator, click-click.
    This is awful. Maybe something has happened to the boy. Must be the kid is worse. If only I hadn’t lost my temper with the truck driver and started down the street so fast; if only I hadn’t muffed that fly ball that day. If ... if ... if ...
    A voice asked whether Dr. Jansen was there, whether Dr. Jansen had come down from Surgery, and finally in tired tones someone answered, “Dr. Jansen.”
    “Oh, Doctor, this Cecil McDade.”
    “Who?”
    “Cecil McDade, yessuh. I’m inquiring about Dean Kennedy, the boy who was injured last week in an auto accident. Hurt his leg, remember?”
    “Oh, yes, oh, yes, I remember. You’re the man who ... yes, I remember now.” There was an unpleasant pause. “Ah, that didn’t turn out quite so well, not quite as we all expected.”
    Highpockets hardly knew what to say. He was stunned. If only I’d kept my temper with that taxi driver, and had started off more slowly. “Yessuh. Is he still there in the hospital?”
    “Yes, he is. You see that case didn’t turn out the way we hoped. The boy