At Ford's Grand Opera House pandemonium broke loose. Hats were flung toward the rafters. Harry yon der Horst pranced across the stage, waving an orange-and-black pennant. In silver letters it proclaimed: Champions, 1894.

The shouts awakened the ballplayers, asleep on the train. It was five in the morning but a crowd had gathered at the railway station in Grafton, in the dour hills of West Virginia.

"Jennings! Jennings!" the men chanted. They were coal miners, as Hughey had been.

The train was not permitted to continue on its way to Baltimore until the finest shortstop on earth popped his sunburnt, carrot-topped head out through a window, into the dawning day.

Farther east along the Baltimore & Ohio track, past the rocky cliffs, in the hamlets of Oakland and Piedmont, the throngs of cranks called Oriole after Oriole to the platform.

The pennant winners stopped for breakfast in Cumberland, in the mountains of western Maryland. It seemed as if every man, woman, and child in the town had turned out. Shout after shout went up as the Orioles descended from the train. Everything was decorated in black and orange. The ballplayers wore their sharp new black sweaters with orange piping as they forced their way through the crowd. At the Queen City Hotel, a banner over the porch declared: "Cumberland Welcomes the Champions. Get at 'em!"

A thirty-piece band struck up "Maryland, My Maryland." Inside the hotel, as the Orioles ate, the ladies of Cumberland filed in to watch. They marveled at what a handsome fellow McMahon was and wondered which one was Brouthers and which was Robinson. The prying eyes made Willie and McGraw, the youngest of the Orioles, lose a little of their appetites.

As the team re-emerged into the morning, the cranks of Cumberland outside the hotel hollered: "Hanlon! Hanlon!" And then: "Speech! Speech!"

The quiet manager removed his hat. "Ladies and gentlemen of Cumberland," he began. "In behalf of the Baltimore baseball club I thank you for this hearty and unexpected greeting." He promised that the Orioles would play a game in Cumberland, once they had defeated the Giants for the Temple Cup, in the postseason series to come. He was presented with a colossal glass bat filled with ten-year-old rye, which Hanlon vowed not to drink for another ten years.

The ballplayers crooned a ballad written for them, "We'll Hang Johnny Ward from a Sour Apple Tree." The crowd went wild.

An escort committee of twenty distinguished Baltimoreans -- ten had not sufficed -- met the train in Washington. The crowd was already gathering in Baltimore, at Camden Station, the turreted brick terminus of the B&O, the nation's oldest commercial railroad.

The train was due in at 6:35 on a Tuesday evening, the second of October. By five o'clock some five thousand cranks had gathered. This had grown to twenty-five thousand by five-thirty and to fifty thousand by half past six. Darkness had fallen. When the rooters realized that buying a ticket to any destination earned a place on the railway platform, there was a surge of interest in short trips to the suburbs. Young men climbed the poles in the station and out along the rafters over the track.

Cheers went up when the headlight of a locomotive came into sight. The train arrived three minutes early -- snap and ginger, indeed. Fireworks went off inside the station. Outside, the throngs heard it and set off a din such as the city had never known.

The new champions could barely edge their way onto the platform. A fife and drum corps of forty boys led the Orioles, in their uniforms, through the station. The crowds parted to let the players through to their carriages, then immediately closed up again, stranding the reception committee and the newspapermen. It took the policemen an hour to untangle the mob and get the parade moving toward the Fifth Regiment Armory.

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