to lessen the impact.

“What’s eating you?” fired Lank, skating up as Whiz was off with the puck.

Carl’s usual self-confident manner was gone. His face looked drawn. He was actually trembling. There was no time to question him then with Siddall once more threatening Taber’s goal and goalie Frank Carey doing another magnificent job of standing the invaders off. A mix-up in front of the cage brought a face-off and once again Carl had the puck. Once again his brilliant skating took him out of the pack on a solo dash which swept past mid-rink and beyond the blue line into Siddall’s end zone. Once again, however, with the crowd screaming wildly, expecting a characteristic Carl Hemmer drive through the enemy’s defense, Taber’s right wing swerved to avoid a collision. In doing so he lost his balance and the puck was jostled from the crook of his stick, all his effort going for naught.

“Booh!” shouted an over-zealous fan, but the razz died in his throat as the crowd hushed him.

Chagrined beyond words, Carl skated madly back into play, now chasing the Siddall men with the puck and trying to wrest it from them. Taber’s idol was a hollow husk of himself and Siddall now knew it for a certainty. Whiz Deagen even took to taunting him by slapping the puck his way, confident that Taber’s crack player couldn’t get past Siddall’s blue line.

“I dare you!” he shouted, and a fellow whose face was almost as blue as the line in the ice marking the zones, couldn’t bring himself to accept the challenge.

At the end of the second period the score was—Siddall, 1; Taber, 0.

In the locker room perturbed team-mates gathered about Carl to inquire the cause of his poor play. Carl could only answer them with a hopeless shake of the head. But Lank Broderick, more sympathetic, took him by the arm and led him to one side.

“What is it, Carl? Tell me!”

Taber’s right wing, always the bulwark of the team before, now clutched his running mate’s arm, piteously.

“Lank, I can’t explain it. All I know is ... I can’t make myself go through any more. I think I can when I start out ... but when I’m right there ... I lose my nerve or something!... It’s the most terrible feeling.... It feels like I’m just about to skate into blackness...!”

Lank, watching Carl closely, nodded understandingly.

“Listen, Lank,” begged Carl, tremulously. “We’ve got to win this game. I used to break the defense and get through to take passes from you and shoot the goals. Can’t we reverse things?... You go through and I’ll pass to you!”

Lank hesitated. “I can try,” he promised. “It’s not so easy to get through that bunch. I don’t have your form, you know. You had a system all your own...!”

“I’m sorry,” Carl said. “I feel like a rotter.”

“You’ll snap into it,” Lank encouraged. “Come on—let’s go!”

Siddall skated out for the third and last period a cocky sextet headed by a carefree Whiz Deagen. True, the visitors were only leading by one goal but their defense had been impregnable and they had stopped the mighty Carl Hemmer cold even as Winston, a much lesser team, had done the week before. There was no reason why they could not add to their score or, failing in this, hold a stubbornly defensive Taber to no goals.

Lank Broderick, Taber’s left wing, true to his word, tried to crack Siddall’s defense but was repulsed. He tried again and again, being body-checked out of play. The crowd seemed to sense that he was attempting to make up in a measure for Carl’s strange loss of form and he was cheered each time he took the puck.

“Get going, Carl!” the fans yelled, to no avail.