by for a while. Then two or three of them ventured up, patted him on the back and told him not to worry, that it would be all right, that it would be a different story next year.
They thought he was crying because he had lost the ball game.
Tom Swift was notified of his release from the New York baseball club that winter.
Pop Dillon heard from him two or three times the year following. Swift was playing ball with a minor league outfit in the Middle West and a maiden sister had charge of the baby, who was named Harold. Then the letters, which had hinted that all was not going well with the Swifts, suddenly stopped.
Pop Dillon meantime had worries of his own those days. The aftermath of the business panic of 1907 was still affecting New York and an ex-ball player of forty-two years with no previous industrial experience was finding it very difficult to secure steady employment. For weeks that winter Pop walked the streets looking for employment.
One cold January morning, with snow on the ground and a gray, somber sky overhead, he was sitting on a bench near the Battery, the southernmost tip of Manhattan, staring into the fog that hovered over the river and hid Governor's Island. Pop was turning things over in his discouraged brain.
A mournful noise of fog horns penetrated the gray curtain over the river ever and again. The toots of the ferry boats, the shrill pipings of tugs
