Battles arrived back in Scotland in 1928, joining Hearts for a reported £9-per-week wage. His impact was immediate, as he scored 6 times during two intra-squad pre-season trial games. More remarkably, the first of these exhibition games drew a crowd of 18,000, primarily to see the new recruit in action. He scored on his competitive debut, in a 3-1 defeat of Queens Park at Hampden Park, and followed that up by scoring twice in his next game and notching a hat-trick on his third Hearts appearance. By the end of the 1928-29 season he had scored a club record 31 goals in 28 League games as Hearts finished in 4th position and was attracting transfer attention from the pre-eminent English sides of the era, Arsenal and Huddersfield Town.