As Dickinson foresaw, Melvin yielded to the pressure brought to bear upon him, and resigned himself to the thankless task of managing the track team. The election was held a week after Thanksgiving, arousing but a lukewarm interest. With fine ice on the river, and the Christmas holidays close at hand, few had more than a thought for the distant spring. Even the problems of the baseball season were as yet but lightly mentioned. There was a general optimism in the air that year at Seaton which carried everything before it, like the high tides of confidence which sometimes sweep over the stock-market. It made little difference who were captains or managers; this was Seaton’s year; the teams were bound to win. Only a few of the wiser heads—perhaps not all the captains and managers themselves—understood fully the danger of such a mood.

If the task of athletic manager proved to Melvin for the time being a sinecure, another office which was suddenly thrust upon him was quite the opposite. No one knew exactly how the hockey rivalry started, or who were the first to fan it into flame. It was just the kind of contest most likely to arise where boys gather from every part of the country, each loyal to his home and state, and each ready to boast superiority, and defend the boast with tongue and muscle. Dick had hardly been twice on the ice when the hockey players began to pair off into New England and Western teams. By some natural agreement the Hudson River was made the boundary line,—a rather unfair division, as it afterwards proved, for the New Englanders included considerably more than half the skaters. At first the rivalry was general and unorganized; then teams were more carefully picked; and finally, as the victory wavered from East to West in these miscellaneous engagements, and enthusiasm and pugnacious patriotism spread, the school was sifted for experts, champion teams were chosen, and a day set for a single decisive contest. It was then that Dick found to his surprise that he was appointed captain of the Western team.

Sands, the captain of the school nine, who lived in Chicago, brought him the news.

“How absurd!” cried Dick, aghast. “Why, I’m no hockey player. There must be a dozen fellows better than I.”

“They think you’ll be the best leader, anyway,” returned Sands; “and as there’s no one else eligible whom the fellows will follow, you’ll just have to take it. When a man handles a football as you did last fall, he’s supposed to be capable of anything. Don’t try for the nine, please. You can’t play ball on a reputation, and I should hate to have to fire you from the squad.”

Sands threw himself on the sofa, and waited for an answer.

“There’s no danger of that,” replied Melvin, unruffled. “I don’t play ball. As for the hockey business, I’m quite willing to act as leader, if it’s understood that I make no pretensions to being a crack.”

He pondered a moment and then went on: “What material is there? Curtis and Toddy don’t live in New England. That gives us four solid men for a nucleus.”

“You’re out there,” Sands answered gloomily. “Curtis lives in New York and Todd in Brooklyn, and both are east of the Hudson.”

Melvin looked serious. “Then they’ll be on the other side. I don’t like that. I’ve stood side by side with John Curtis in so many hard fights that it seems like treachery to play against him. I really don’t want to do it.”

Sands laughed. “That’s you all over. You tackle everything big and little in deadly earnest as if you were fighting the battle of Gettysburg all by yourself. This isn’t a Hillbury game; it’s a kind of lark.”

“Oh, yes, I know all about that kind of a lark. When you begin, it’s a joke; before you’re through, it’s a fight for blood.”

“What do you think of my case?” replied Sands. “I have one brother in Yale and another in Harvard, and both on the teams.”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Melvin. “How do they contrive to avoid scrapping?”

“They never discuss college matters at all. When I’m with one, he urges me to go to Yale; when the other gets hold of me, he talks Harvard; when we are all together, they cut the subject.”

Dick still meditated. Sands tried another tack.

“The New Englanders are talking big. Curtis says the Greasers will wish they’d stayed on the plains when his team’s through with them.”

“Did he really say that?” asked Dick, straightening up.

“He did, and Toddy told Marks the Yanks would clean us off the ice so quickly you’d think they’d used Sapolio.”

“He must consider us either sandless or mighty green,” said Dick.

“And he’s more than half right, too,” replied Sands, “as far as the greenness is concerned. It’s one thing to play with a mob in the old-fashioned go-as-you-please way, and quite another to run a regular team of seven, with complicated rules, and lifts and shoots and body checks and passes and on-side and off-side play, and all the tricks of the new game.”

“I don’t believe he’ll find us as simple as we look,” replied Melvin, as he opened a drawer and took out a sheet of paper. “I’ll take the captaincy, provisionally at any rate; and we’ll call out candidates this very afternoon. I’ll post the notice as soon as I can write it. See all the fellows you can; tell them the Yanks are crowing, and we’ll have a big push and lots of zeal. Do you know any hockey experts on our side of the river?”

“The only crack I’ve heard of is a fellow named Bosworth, but he’s on the other side.”

“I’m glad of it,” said Melvin; “I don’t like him.”

In answer to the captain’s call a score of enthusiasts gathered on the upper river. Varrell was among them, and Sands, and Burnett, and several heavy men who seemed promising for forwards, and a little, wiry, dark-haired fellow from Minneapolis named Durand, whom Dick immediately picked out as likely to prove a steady player on the second team. The first task was to find who were well used to the game, and who needed special instruction; the second, to set the experienced to coach the inexperienced; the third, to divide the men into squads, set several games going, and watch the work. Finally, the captain chose a trial seven, gave the scrub an extra man, and tried a ten-minute half.

Little Durand and Varrell, who had never impressed his classmates as an athlete, found themselves on the scrub. Varrell took coverpoint and Durand put himself among the forwards. The puck was faced and started on its erratic, whimsical journey, darting like a wild thing back and forth, up and down. Before the game seemed really well begun, the circular piece of rubber came within Varrell’s sweep, and clung to the heel of his stick. He whirled to the right to dodge Barnes, passed across to little Durand when Melvin blocked his way, took the puck again from Durand as the latter was stopped in his turn, and then, with a swing and a snap, shot it hard at the posts. The goal-tender brought his feet together as quickly as he could, but not quite quickly enough; the puck was already past him, flying knee-high over the ice like a swallow skimming the ground.

“Centre again!” cried Melvin, surprised and vexed at the ease with which the thing was done. “Brace up, Sands,” he called encouragingly to the goal-keeper. “Accidents will happen; they won’t do it again.”

The first forwards did better for a time, driving the puck down by sheer force through the intimidated second defence. Twice they shot for goal and missed, and then Varrell got a chance again and with a kind of scoop with stick directly in front, lifted the puck in a long beautiful arch twenty feet high to the farther end. Sands sent it back again with almost as good a lift. A lucky second stopped it, passed it to Varrell who nursed it along in a strange, wabbling course, and delivered it safely to Durand. The latter swept ahead in turn, and then while Melvin was wondering in what direction Durand was going to wheel, Varrell took the puck again and shot a beautiful goal right under the captain’s own nose.

Sands and Melvin and Varrell trudged back to recitation together. “Where did you learn to play?” asked Sands. “You handle a stick like a professional.”

“I spent last year at a Canadian boarding-school,” answered Varrell. “There was good ice for months, and hockey was about the only game we had.”

“You and Durand played the whole game for the second. What a squirmer the little rascal is! He doesn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten, and yet you can’t knock him over to save you.”

“He checks low,” said Dick, “and is firm on his feet. But he’s awfully light. I doubt if he has much staying power.”

“I think you’re wrong,” said Varrell. “I’ve seen that kind before; they never get tired.”

In the next day’s practice, Varrell and Durand being on the scrub, the score at the end of the first half was even. In the second half the two men played with the first team, and the scrub defence was kept so busy that the game seemed to centre around their goal-posts, and Melvin had finally to transfer Sands to the other side to give him a share in the practice. To furnish some test of endurance, the length of the half was doubled. When time was called, Durand was bobbing and twisting and checking and shooting as busily as ever, while one of the big forwards was obviously fagged, and Melvin himself felt that his ankles were rebelling at the unusual strain.

That settled the question of the team; Varrell and Durand had earned their places upon it. Two or three days later a meeting of the team was held to receive Melvin’s resignation.

“I’ve got the team together,” he said, “and with that my duty is done. The best captain for us now is the man who knows most hockey and can teach us the most; I’m not that man.”

The players at first expostulated; then finding that Melvin was in earnest, very sensibly did what they knew he wanted them to do,—elected Varrell captain.

“I think it’s a mistake,” said Sands to Barnes, as they came down the dormitory stairs. “Nobody knows Varrell. But there’s no use arguing with Melvin about a thing of this kind. He’s one of those obstinately honest fellows who stand up so straight that they fall backwards.”

“You dropped the Greaser captaincy like a hot shot,” quoth John Curtis on the way out from chapel, as he grabbed Melvin by the coat collar with the familiarity of an old crony, and grinned in his face. “Knew you were going to get licked, didn’t you? You’re a foxy one.”

Dick looked up and caught a fleeting troubled look on the face of Varrell, who stood eying them intently some distance away. “I wasn’t good enough,” he said aloud, as if Varrell could hear him. “On a team like ours, I’m content to fight in the ranks.”

As John did not understand this, he merely uttered an incredulous “Oho!” and, giving his classmate a slap on the shoulder to convey the impression that he was not to be fooled, went outside to consider the answer more fully and wonder if the Greasers were really trying to spring some new trick upon the Yanks. Melvin swung into the Greek room and opened his Homer with a chuckle of pride. “That would pass for a Delphic response. He doesn’t know what I meant. And he won’t know until the game,” he added, with the old determined look coming back into his face.