“That’s bad,” said Doctor Lawrence who sat beside Coach Corcoran on the bench. “It’s still got him!”
Whiz Deagen, following Carl closely, caught him as he slackened his pace, crossed sticks with him and scraped the puck away as both brought up against the sideboards with a crash, Carl pulling back instinctively to lessen the impact.
“What’s eating you?” fired Lank, skating up as Whiz was off with the puck.
Carl’s usual self-confident manner was gone. His face looked drawn. He was actually trembling. There was no time to question him then with Siddall once more threatening Taber’s goal and goalie Frank Carey doing another magnificent job of standing the invaders off. A mix-up in front of the cage brought a face-off and once again Carl had the puck. Once again his brilliant skating took him out of the pack on a solo dash which swept past mid-rink and beyond the blue line into Siddall’s end zone. Once again, however, with the crowd screaming wildly, expecting a characteristic Carl Hemmer drive through the enemy’s defense, Taber’s right wing swerved to avoid a collision. In doing so he lost his balance and the puck was jostled from the crook of his stick, all his effort going for naught.
“Booh!” shouted an over-zealous fan, but the razz died in his throat as the crowd hushed him.
Chagrined beyond words, Carl skated madly back into play, now chasing the Siddall men with the puck and trying to wrest it from them. Taber’s idol was a hollow husk of himself and Siddall now knew it for a certainty. Whiz Deagen even took to taunting him by slapping the puck his way, confident that Taber’s crack player couldn’t get past Siddall’s blue line.
“I dare you!” he shouted, and a fellow whose face was almost as blue as the line in the ice marking the zones, couldn’t bring himself to accept the challenge.
At the end of the second period the score was—Siddall, 1; Taber, 0.
In the locker room perturbed team-mates gathered about Carl to inquire the cause of his poor play. Carl could only answer them with a hopeless shake of the head. But Lank Broderick, more sympathetic, took him by the arm and led him to one side.
“What is it, Carl? Tell me!”