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tried again. Again he missed. He was about to try for the third time when someone said, “You’re doin’ it all wrong.”
    Lewis turned and saw a skinny boy about his own age squatting next to the bicycle rack. There was a big fluff of brick-red hair on top of the boy’s head, and his right arm was in a sling. The boy was Tarby.
    Everybody in the school knew who Tarby was. Even Lewis knew, and he had only been in New Zebedee for a couple of months. Probably everyone in New Zebedee and most of the people in Capharnaum County knew who Tarby was. At least, that was the impression that Lewis got. Tarby was the most popular boy in the school. He was a daredevil, the kind of boy who rode his bicycle through bonfires and hung by his knees from the limbsof trees. All the girls liked him, and he was the big home-run hitter in the softball games. He got chosen first so often that most of the time the boys made him a captain, just to avoid all the fighting over who got to have Tarby on their team. But here he was with his arm in a sling, watching Lewis as he tried to hit the ball.
    “I said, you’re doing it all wrong. You’re supposed to keep your feet planted flat. Then you swing from the hips. Here. Let me show you.”
    Tarby scrambled to his feet and walked over to where Lewis was standing. He grabbed the bat and hefted it in one hand, choking up on it a bit.
    “Okay,” he said, “get out there and pitch. Just lob it up here.”
    Lewis had never seen anyone trying to hit a ball with the bat held in only one hand. He was afraid that Tarby would miss and get mad and go home. With a nervous grin on his face, Lewis lobbed the ball toward the plate. Tarby swung and the bat connected.
Clack!
It struck the ball with that rickety hollow sound that split bats have. The ball shot on a line toward center field. It would have been a clean single.
    “See? And that’s just with one arm. You ought to be able to do that well with two. C’mon. I’ll pitch.”
    Lewis walked in from the pitcher’s mound and took the bat from Tarby’s hand.
    “I didn’t know your arm was broken,” said Lewis shyly. “How’d you do it?”
    “Fell out of a tree. I was hanging by my knees. Upside down, like in the monkey house. It’s okay. It’ll heal up.”
    Tarby walked out to the mound. Lewis pounded his bat on the plate and waved it the way he had seen George Kell do in Briggs Stadium in Detroit. But when Tarby threw the ball, Lewis missed as usual.
    Every day for the next two weeks Tarby met Lewis after school, and they practiced batting. Slowly, gradually, Lewis’s swing got better. He even managed to hit a few line drives. But something even more important was happening. Lewis and Tarby were getting to be friends. Tarby liked Lewis’s jokes, and Lewis found out that Tarby hated some of the kids that he hated. Lewis liked Tarby’s imitation of Mrs. Fondrighter, a mean teacher at school. Mrs. Fondrighter always called her husband “Jerrold,” which was a funny thing to do. Tarby made a loop in the end of a green twig and pretended it was an eyeglass on a stick. Then he would stare through the loop at Lewis and say, in a high voice, “How
deah
you say such things to me, Jer-
rold!
”
    Then Lewis and Tarby would sit around planning how they were going to take care of Carol Kay Laberdeen, a snotty girl in the sixth grade who got away with murder because her father was on the school board. It was usually dark by the time Lewis and Tarby said goodby to each other by the mailbox at the bottom of High Street.
    One afternoon early in October, Lewis and Tarbywere out at the athletic field playing flies and grounders. Lewis had gotten good enough so that he could hit Tarby some pretty long fly balls. Tarby’s arm was still in a cast, but he picked off the line drives and caught the pop flies as easily as if he had had two hands.
    Lewis was out in the field. It was getting dark, and he was having trouble seeing the ball, and besides he was a