“Worse than that!” broke in Steve Lucas, captain and center. “It would be different, Fred, if you weren’t such a good skater ... but there’s no excuse for the way you’re side-stepping and skating in circles and dropping the puck at the blue line instead of trying to go through the defense. There’s a certain color that applies to guys who pull what you’ve been pulling. We wouldn’t care only we’d give our skates to beat Melville this year.”
“And a fat chance we’ve got with Don Keith out,” ranted Bill Stewart, stocky right defense. “He was the spark plug of our team. All you’ve done is fill us up with carbon!”
“I’m sorry,” was the new team member’s comment as he unfastened his skates and stepped off the rink. “But why jump me about this? I suggest you take your story to the coach. Any time he wants me to leave the team, I’ll be delighted.”
Fellow players groaned helplessly as Frederick, the Great, Barker walked off, head high.
“He’s a conundrum, that bird!” declared Rand. “You’d think he didn’t have any fight in him.”
“He doesn’t when it comes to sports like this,” said Bill. “You hit the nail on the head when you razzed him about not wanting to mix it. I can understand now why he’s steered clear of us fellows. He’s against anything boisterous.”
“He’s grooming himself to be one of those gentleman sportsmen,” twitted Steve, “whose pictures you see in the rotogravure section of newspapers, sitting on a horse, dressed in a polo cap; or else stretched out on a country club veranda, in golf togs. The pictures look swell but most of ’em don’t mean any thing.”
“He’s a grand guy,” summed up Rand. “I have to hand it to him for one thing. He’s sure satisfied with himself. If I’d bawled any of you birds out the way I did him, I’d have started a free-for-all. He’s got the spunk of a caterpillar.”
“Coach certainly won’t leave him in the line-up after today’s game,” reassured goal tender Chub Roland. “We were lucky not to lose. Fred spent about the whole time dodging collisions with the enemy. I think he only went down once. He’s a fancy skater all right. He did some of the fanciest shifting I ever saw. Never used his body to block once ... tried to do it all with his stick. I yelled to him once to get in front of his man but he acted like he thought it wouldn’t be the gentlemanly thing to do. Too bad he has to be such a lemon. I still think if we could get him steamed up about something—he might surprise us.”