“Into a net, to be more exact. Do you skate well?”
Lamar laughed again. “About the way a hen swims,” he said.
“Then your chance of making the hockey team will be small,” answered Pug, with a good deal of satisfaction, I thought.
“Oh, I’ll learn skating. I’ve tried it once or twice. I reckon it’s not so hard, eh?”
Pug smiled ironically. “Possibly it will come easy—to you,” he said.
“Hope so. Anyway, I’m going to have a stab at it. You don’t happen to know where I can borrow some skates, then?”
We didn’t, and Lamar went on talking about hockey until Pug gathered up the chessmen and went off. When he had gone Lamar grinned at me and said: “Corking chap, Pug. So sympathetic.” Then he got his crook-handled umbrella out of the closet and began pushing my glass paper weight about the floor with it, making his feet go as if he was skating, and upset the waste basket and a chair and got the rug all rumpled up.
A couple of days later I asked him how he was getting on with hockey, and he said. “Fine!” He said the candidates hadn’t got the sticks yet; that they were just doing calisthenics. After that he reported progress every day, but we didn’t pay much attention to him, because if we did he would never stop, and neither Pug nor I was interested in hockey. But afterwards I learned that Lamar used to spend hours on the gymnasium floor, outside of practice periods, shooting a puck at a couple of Indian clubs set up to make a goal. There wasn’t any ice before Christmas to speak of, and so the rinks weren’t even flooded.
When Lamar came back after recess he brought a fine pair of hockey skates which his uncle had given him. I said it was funny that his uncle should have known that he wanted skates, but Lamar said it wasn’t funny at all because he had written to him a couple of weeks ahead and told him. I think it was about the tenth of January before the weather got cold enough to make skating possible, but after that the ice stayed right along until the first week in March. Several times Lamar wanted Pug and me to go over to the rink and see practice, but we thought it would be pretty cold work, standing around there in the snow, and we didn’t go until, along in February, there was a mild Saturday and a lot of talk about a game between our team and Warwick Academy. So Pug and I, deciding that some outdoor exercise might be beneficial to us, went over and looked on. We hadn’t intended remaining long, for Pug is subject to colds and I am likely to have chilblains if I stay outdoors much in winter, but as it happened we stayed right through to the end. I was quite surprised to discover that the game could be so interesting, even exciting, from the spectator’s viewpoint, and I fancy Pug was, too. Lamar, who was sitting with a number of other substitutes on a bench, wrapped in a blanket, saw us and came across and explained some of the subtleties of the game. I asked him if he was going to play and he said no, not unless all the others were killed.