ON THE ICE
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.
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