"You'll enter, won't you, Jimmy, and you, Frank?" said Patterson.
"Sure," was the answer.
"Get Channing to send a challenge to the whole school," continued Patterson. "Have him send it to Mr. Parks, who is a friend of the school athletics and always willing to help."
The hockey game had ended by this time, and the triumphant Warwickites went back up the river shouting a song of victory which did not strike pleasantly on the ears of the defeated Queen's team. It had been customary for the teams to cheer each other, but Dixon and his players had climbed out of the rink without a word, taken off their skates and gone sullenly to the gymnasium.
True to his word, the Warwick boy, who had proposed the ice carnival on the afternoon of the hockey game, took the matter to Channing, and that young man was eager for it.
"We've beaten Queen's in baseball this year, football and hockey, and we'd beat them if they had basket-ball, and we'll clean them up on the ice races. We can beat them at anything from tiddle-de-winks up to throwing the javelin. They have a society down there which runs athletics, and until they get over that disease the best fellows in the school are not allowed to play. That hockey game this afternoon was a joke."
Channing got to work at once and spread the proposed plan about Warwick. It was eagerly taken up, and the result was the following challenge in the morning's mail:
"To Queen's School:
"Warwick School challenges you to a series of ice races on the Wampaug river on Saturday of this week. We propose a half-mile race, a hundred-yard race, and a mile race,—all to be skated straightaway, without turns—each school to hold its trials and present only its best skaters in these events. The racing to be open to everyone in each school, and the entrants are to be chosen only on merit.
"(Signed) Robert Channing,
"For Warwick School."
Mr. Parks, thoroughly in sympathy with anything which was in the nature of a good, clean contest, particularly when it was on such a broad basis, was heartily in favor of the movement for a competition, and posted the letter conspicuously on the bulletin board in the gymnasium vestibule.
The letter attracted much attention, and every boy in Queen's who could skate, or thought he could, entered his name on a long sheet of paper which Mr. Parks put there for that purpose. Of course, Frank, Jimmy and Lewis were entered. Their names were among the first to go down in their class.