There was no summons from the Office that day, and Toby began to take hope. By evening he was in quite an equable state of mind, thanks, perhaps, to an hour and a half of hard work on the rink. There’s nothing much better than outdoor exercise to restore a fellow’s mind to a normal condition. And for one twenty-minute period Toby had played goal against the second seven and for an hour before that had taken part in a hard, brisk practice, his visit to the bench having been of a scant ten-minute duration. Animated by the desperate resolve to wreak vengeance on Frank Lamson by beating him out for the position of first choice goal, Toby had worked harder than he ever had before, with the result that his playing had been almost of the spectacular kind during the time he had guarded the first team’s goal. Henry, who had been at the rink looking on a bit disconsolately, had told him afterwards, enthusiasm struggling against depression, that he had “knocked them down in great shape, Tucker, my lad, and no bally mistake about it!” And Toby had gone back to the gymnasium feeling a bit proud of himself and hugging the thought that revenge against Frank Lamson was certain and overwhelming. And then, in the upper hall, he had run plumb against Frank!

That Arnold had said nothing to Frank of Toby’s accusation was at once evident, for Frank hailed the younger boy almost cordially. “Great stuff, Toby!” he said. “You and I are going to have a real race, eh? By ginger, old scout, I didn’t know you had it in you!” The accompanying laugh suggested, however, that he was not seriously disturbed. Toby colored, momentarily embarrassed. The last thing he wanted from Frank was congratulation!

“Thanks,” he said stiffly. “Glad you like it.”

“Well, don’t get grouchy about it!” exclaimed Frank. “Any one would think I’d insulted you. Go to the dickens, will you?”

Toby passed him without response, trying hard to look haughty and dignified. That he wasn’t particularly successful in his effort was suggested by Frank’s amused laugh behind him. Later, on his way to the showers, Toby encountered Arnold. It seemed, he thought as he pulled the curtain across and turned the cold water on with more than usual disregard of results, that he was always running into Arn! After he had recovered from the first breath-taking shock of the shower he grumbled: “And he looks like he thought I was a worm, too, confound him! Any one would suppose that it was my fault! I had a perfect right to tell the truth about Frank. He did steal that money from me, and Arn’s saying he didn’t doesn’t alter the fact a bit. Maybe when he finds that Frank isn’t the fine hero he thinks he is he’ll come off his high horse. But he needn’t think I’m going to crawl, for I’m not. If he waits for me to apologize he will wait a mighty long while!”

Coach Loring came to him while he was dressing. “Beech is going to practice with you in the morning, Tucker,” he said. “At eleven. He will tell you what days he’s free. Let me know when he can’t be there and I’ll arrange with some one else—or do it myself. I noticed you used your body more to-day in stopping shots. It’s the best plan. Keep it up, Tucker.”

But in spite of all this encouragement Toby wasn’t really happy that evening. Supper had been a trying affair. Of course neither he nor Arnold had even so much as glanced at each other, much less spoken, and he was conscious all during the meal of the amused or inquiring glances of the other occupants of Table 14. He wondered whether he could get himself moved to another table, but abandoned the idea the next moment. He had done nothing and wasn’t going to run away as though he had. If Arnold didn’t like eating with him, why, let Arnold move. He put in an hour of study and then pressed Will Curran’s trousers, and a suit belonging to another boy, and tried very hard to concoct a rhymed reply to Curran’s missive. But rhyming was not Toby’s forte and he gave it up finally and climbed into bed to lie awake a long while in the darkness, thinking rather unhappy thoughts about life.

Grover Beech was awaiting him at the rink the next morning at a few minutes past eleven and, after they had shooed a half-dozen preparatory class boys from the ice, they set to work. Toby liked the long and lank second team captain and his respect for the latter’s skating and shooting prowess increased remarkably during that fifty minutes of work.

“I don’t know just what the silly idea is,” Beech remarked as he dropped the puck and circled back toward the middle of the rink with it, “but here goes, Tucker!” Beech tore down toward goal, zig-zagging, playing the puck first on one side and then on the other, dug his skates when a few yards away, swept past and, at the last moment, flicked the disk cunningly past Toby’s skates. Toby fished it out of the net ruefully, and Beech laughed.

“Keep your eyes open, Tucker!” he called, skating backward and dragging the puck in the crook of his blade. “Loring says he wants you to have practice, son, and I mean to give it to you. So watch your eye, boy!”

“Let her come!” laughed Toby.

And come she did, a long shot that skimmed through the air a foot above the ice and made straight for the center of the net. Toby silently applauded that shot even as he bent and brought his leg-guards together. There was a thud and the disk bounded yards away. Beech, who had followed it up, tried to snap it in, but he was skating too fast and the puck struck the side post.

“Good stop,” he applauded. “Thought I had you then.”

“It was a peach of a shot,” called Toby. “Give me some more like that, will you? Those are the sort I want to learn to stop.”

Beech obliged, but lift shots weren’t successful for him, and presently he went back to his first style, that of skating in close to goal and snapping the puck so quickly to one side or the other that it was difficult for Toby to move fast enough to block it. Once, being caught too far to one side of the cage, he tried to stop the puck with his stick blade and learned a lesson. For the puck jumped over the blade and rolled to the back of the net. Three times out of a dozen or so shots, Beech tallied in that fashion. Then Toby worked out the solution. The next time, when Beech came swinging up—he could shoot almost as well left-handed as right—Toby dashed out to meet him, a proceeding so unexpected to Beech that he almost forgot to shoot. When he did the puck bounded off Toby’s knee and skimmed off to the side of the rink.

“Huh!” grunted Beech. “I wondered how long you’d let me do that. Just the same, you don’t want to try that trick very often, Tucker, or you’ll come to grief. If there’d been some one with me I’d simply have passed, you see.”

They stopped a minute and talked that over. Beech seemed to have a good deal of hockey sense, Toby thought, and the older boy decided that young Tucker was a pretty brainy lad. Toward the last of the practice Mr. Loring appeared and watched interestedly.

“Beech,” he said finally, “take some shots from about five yards away, please. You don’t need to skate. Work right around in a half-circle shooting from the different angles. Let’s see what Tucker’s weakest point is.”

It developed that Toby’s principal weakness was in meeting shots made from that arc of the circle lying to his left. In other words, as Mr. Loring pointed out, an opposing right wing would stand a better chance of scoring through Toby than a left wing would. “You’re right-handed, Tucker,” he said. “You can’t afford to be. Learn to use your left hand and the left side generally as easily and quickly as your right. Try it again, Beech.” And then, after Toby had stopped the puck none too cleverly, he followed with: “See what I mean, Tucker? When the puck comes at you from your right or from the center you meet it nicely, but when it comes to you from where Beech is shooting you have trouble. You don’t cross as naturally from right to left as you do vice versa and you don’t handle your body as well. To-morrow you’d better pay a good deal of attention to shots from that side. Practice swinging across from the right post to the left. If you keep your knee against the post and push out with it when you want to cross you’ll get a quicker start. Try it now. That’s pretty good. But you favor your right too much. A good goal-tend mustn’t know one side from the other. It wouldn’t take long for an enemy to discover your weakness, Tucker, and they’d pound you from the right—that is, your left—till the cows come home. Look here, what about those gloves? Didn’t you say you were going to get some decent ones?”

“Yes, sir, but I—I haven’t had time yet.”

“Well, get at it, man! Those things aren’t fit to wear. Your fingers would freeze numb on a cold day. Better attend to it to-day if you can. It’s five minutes to twelve, fellows. You’d better stop now. Can you come again to-morrow, Beech?”

“Yes, sir, to-morrow and Thursday, but not Friday; nor Saturday either.”

“Never mind about Saturday. We’ll leave Saturday out. I’ll take your place Friday, unless I have to run back to New York that day. What I want to do, Beech, is to make a real corking goal out of Tucker. He’s got a sort of natural style of playing it that looks good to me. Notice it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Loring,” responded Beech doubtfully. “But I know that Tucker can certainly stop them in good style. He’s had me skating my head off, sir, before you came.”

“Stopping them when there’s only one man against you isn’t so hard,” said Toby, tugging at the straps of his leg-guards. “It’s when three or four are skating down on you that the trouble begins!”

“Only one of the four can shoot, Tucker. Remember that. Keep your eye glued to the puck, my boy, and it won’t make much difference if there are twenty at you. It’s the last man who counts.”

They walked back to the gymnasium together and there Mr. Loring left them. As Toby and Beech hurried into their street clothes Beech said: “Some of the fellows think Loring doesn’t know his business, but I don’t see what their kick is. I guess he knows as much hockey as he needs. I like him, don’t you?”

“Awfully,” agreed Toby emphatically. “They say that he was responsible for losing the Broadwood game last year. Did you play then?”

“Not on the first, no. But there’s no sense in blaming Loring for the loss of that game. He did the best he could, I guess. The trouble was that Broadwood had a team that played all around us. They skated better and shot better and checked harder. They played like a team and we played like seven individuals. We didn’t do so badly the first half, but after that Broadwood got a goal on a fluke—Henry kicked the puck into his own goal—and that gave them a lead of two, and we went up in the air and played shinney all the rest of the game. At that they only licked us seven to three; or maybe it was eight to four; something like that. I hope to goodness we sock it to ’em good and hard this time, though. He evidently expects you to play goal in that game, Tucker.”

“I hope I’ll be good enough to,” replied Toby. “I—I’d like it awfully.”

“Of course you would,” laughed the other. “I’d like it myself. I’ve been playing two years already—three, counting this—and I’ve never got nearer the first team than I am now.”

“I don’t see why,” said Toby. “You shoot wonderfully, I think.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Beech shrugged. “I play pretty fair sometimes and then the next day I don’t. I have pretty good fun with the second, though, and it’s something to be captain of that. I’ve no kick coming. We’d better beat it, Tucker. There goes twelve o’clock!”

They dashed upstairs and out the door, Toby with one shoe-lace flapping in the breeze, and sprinted across to Oxford, Beech winning the race with six yards to spare.

The morning practice was continued the next day and the next, and Toby profited far more than he had dared hope to. In the afternoons he had varying fortune, one day spending most of the playing time on the bench and once going in for the second period against the second. It was always Beech that Toby feared the most now, for the rivalry developed in the morning practice moved both to extra exertions, and, while Toby knew Beech’s attack pretty well, it was equally true that Beech knew Toby’s weaknesses. As far as Toby could see, Crowell still favored Frank Lamson for the position. In fact, Toby was fairly sure that if Coach Loring hadn’t been there Crowell would have left him on the bench most days. Frank’s playing grew neither better nor worse. He was brilliant at times, but never what could be called steady, and he had a bad habit of losing his temper after a tally had been scored on him and playing in an indifferent, swashbuckling sort of fashion for minutes afterwards. Henry was still absent from work and rumor now had it that he had virtually given up hope of reinstatement in time for further playing this season. Toby was sorry for him, but he wouldn’t have been human had he mourned over-much. With Henry out of it, and only Frank Lamson to contend with, Toby’s chance of making the coveted position in time for the Broadwood game brightened each day.

There was no morning practice on Friday, for, although Toby went to the rink dressed for play, Mr. Loring failed to show up. Toby took part in a weird contest with eight preparatory class fellows and had a good time, but he regretted wasting that hour. Later, in the afternoon, it appeared that Mr. Loring had had to go home and would not be able to get back until the first of the next week. Toby was sorry to hear that, for he had secretly hoped that the coach would let him get in for a part of the Nordham game the next afternoon, perhaps for a full period. With Mr. Loring absent, however, Toby felt pretty certain that he would view that contest from the bench. Later, returning to his room at dusk, he found something that made him wonder whether he would even sit on the bench to-morrow!

The something was a gray card, one of the printed forms used by the Office on which only the name, day and hour were written in.

That is what the card said.

Toby said: “Gee!”