“Oh, Joe’s a wonder when he rumples his hair and looks wild-eyed,” said Tom. “He will make Horace Greeley and the rest of our great journalists look like base imitations when he gets started. Did you see the hockey schedule, Alf?”
“Yes, and for a wonder they got it right. It’s a pretty good schedule, Dan.”
“Yes, but when I think of how many bruises I got in the St. John’s game and then multiply them by the number of games to come my courage fails. I guess I’ll be a fit candidate for the infirmary about the middle of the season.”
“Oh,” laughed Alf, “you’ll soon learn to get the puck with your hand instead of your body. It’s a great mistake to try and stop it with your head, Dan.”
Dan felt of a lump just over his forehead.
“I guess you’re right; especially since if I had got out of the way of that one it would have gone out of the rink, whereas by stopping it with my head it fell in front of goal, and some malicious idiot knocked it in before I had stopped studying astronomy!”
“Accidents will happen,” remarked Tom sagely.
“You bet they will! And I’m going to take out an accident policy. I’m beginning to look like a tattooed man, I’m so full of nice little black and blue and yellow spots! I can tell you one thing, Alfred Loring, and that is that if I had known that playing goal was the next thing to being trampled underfoot by an automobile or a trolley car you could have looked somewhere else for a victim!”
“I should think he would want to play the position himself,” said Tom. “It’s the most responsible position on the team and I think a captain ought to occupy it, don’t you, Dan?”
“I wish he would for a while,” answered Dan, with enthusiasm. “As it is, I stand there with my eyes popping out of my head while what seem to be about fifty fellows come charging down on me with the puck doing a shuttle act in front of them. I try to watch the puck and the players at the same time and resolve to sell my life dearly. Then, just when they are on me, Alf here dashes gloriously into the fray, always trying to check the man who hasn’t had the puck for five minutes. They just open up and let him through—or they put out a stick and he does a double tumble—and they proceed to try and kill the goal-tend.”