“Pshaw, pads don’t cost much; only about four dollars, I think. Fifteen dollars will buy everything you’ll need.”
“Gee, that’s cheap, isn’t it?” muttered Toby disconsolately. “I guess I’ll wait and see if there’s any show of making a team before I buy much.”
Arnold laughed as they crossed the colonnade and turned toward the entrance to Whitson. “You were always a cautious chap, Toby!”
“I have to be,” replied the other simply.
“I suppose you do. Look here!” Arnold stopped in the act of pushing open the door. “I’ve got a pretty good pair of skates upstairs. They’ve got button heels, but I guess they’d be all right for you. If you want them you’re welcome. Come on up and I’ll dig them out.”
They proved all right as to size, but, unfortunately, the heel-plates had been lost. Homer Wilkins, who came in while they were bewailing this fact, suggested that they could get new plates by sending to the maker, and they cheered up again. Toby bore the skates away with him to his room and, arrived there, studied that note-book again. Quite a few fellows had paid their accounts by now and so many of the entries had been scored out, but there was still nearly six dollars owing him. Most of the accounts were small, ranging from fifteen cents to thirty, but a few were larger and Frank Lamson’s was the biggest. Frank had promised to pay after vacation, but he hadn’t and Toby considered the advisability of reminding him of his promise. But Toby decided finally that he would rather lose the money than dun Frank for it any more. What he would do, though, was to spend an hour after supper trying to collect some of the other amounts due him. Having reached that decision, he started his gas stove, heated his iron and pressed two pairs of trousers and a coat and waistcoat before supper.
Afterwards, he made the rounds of the dormitories before study hour and returned richer by two dollars and eighty cents. That amount, together with four dollars and twenty-two cents which he had by him, he deposited in a little cardboard box and hid under an extra pair of pajamas in a bureau drawer, after printing on the lid in ink: “Hockey Fund.”
Seven dollars would, he believed, buy a pair of pads and a pair of gloves, and now that Arnold had donated a perfectly corking pair of skates, he wouldn’t have to purchase shoes. He could put the heel-plates, when he got them, on the shoes he was wearing and use them for all purposes. He had a feeling that in expending seven dollars for hockey paraphernalia he was being downright extravagant, but he had earned the money and, he told himself defiantly, he had a right to be reckless with it for once. He didn’t entirely silence an accusing conscience, but he reduced it to whispers!
Toby had already become an enthusiastic hockey fan without as yet having taken part in a game! His efforts to make good as a football player had not been very successful, and he made up his mind that this time he would conquer. He had an ecstatic vision of one Toby Tucker, a blue-and-white stockinette cap on his head, wearing a white sweater with the crossed hockey sticks and the mystic letters Y. H. T. on it, his legs encased in white leather pads such as Henry, the first team goal-tend, had worn that afternoon, armed with a wide-bladed stick, crouching in front of the net while the cheers of Yardley and Broadwood thundered across the rink. The vision stopped there because, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what the heroic Toby Tucker would do if some brutal member of the enemy team tried to put the puck past him! But it was a fine and heart-warming picture, and Toby wanted terribly to see it realized, and it didn’t seem to him at such moments that it would be right to let a small matter of seven dollars interfere with that realization. Besides, there was still the barest, tiniest chance of that scholarship! When Toby was feeling cheerful he recognized that chance. At other times he told himself that it didn’t exist. To-night, being optimistic, he allowed that perhaps, after all, he might win one of the smaller ones. If he did he would never regret the sinful waste of that seven dollars. Fifty dollars would make a lot of difference in his financial condition. However, he would not, he reflected, get his hopes too high. It was much better not to expect anything. Then if he did win a Haynes Scholarship—
Gee, he was getting all excited about it! That wouldn’t do, because it was very, very likely that he wouldn’t succeed. He pulled his books to him and settled himself, with a sigh, for an hour of study. Anyway, he thought, as he opened his algebra, he would know to-morrow, for to-morrow was the eighth and it was on the eighth, according to the school catalogue, that the awards were announced. Of course, since there were only six scholarships for the fourth class and about one hundred students—Toby sighed again, shook his head and plunged into algebra.