e again. How's
Methuselah?"

"Fine and dandy," answered Harry cheerfully. "You must come and see him;
I think he gets rather dull sometimes. I've got some more white mice.
That makes sixteen. I wish I knew what to do with them. Dad says I'll
have to kill them, but I just couldn't do it."

"Why not turn them loose?" asked Roy.

Harry giggled.

"I tried that and some of them came back and went up to John's room and
he found one in his boot in the morning. He was terribly mad about it.
John's very short tempered, you know."

"He must be," laughed Roy.

"Yes. And then yesterday he found two in the grain-chest and told Dad. I
don't think it was nice of him to tell, do you? And Dad says I'll have
to kill them."

"I tell you what," said Roy. "You keep them until warm weather and
we'll take them off somewhere and let them loose. I don't believe they'd
ever get back again."

"But they might die!"

"I don't believe so. Anyway, they'd have a fighting chance, and if you
kill them they won't have. See?"

"John said I ought to buy an owl," said Harry disgustedly, "and feed
them to him. As though I would!"

"John's a brute," said Roy. "How about the squabs?"

"Oh, they're coming fast! There are twelve already. I--I wish they
wouldn't hatch. I hate to have them killed."

"Mighty fine eating, squabs," said Roy teasingly. Harry shot an
indignant glance at him.

"Any person who'd eat a squab," she cried, "deserves to be--to be--"

But Roy didn't learn what such a person deserved, for at that moment Mr.
Cobb summoned the teams out again. Roy peeled off his crimson sweater,
looked to his skate straps and called to Jack. When the latter had
skated up Roy talked to him earnestly for a moment.

"All ready, Porter?" cried Warren.

"About six or eight feet from the corner of the goal," finished Roy.
"And bang it in without waiting for anything. Understand?"

Jack nodded and the two skated to their places. Warren and the opposing
left-center laid their sticks on either side of the puck and the
whistle sounded. There was an instant of shoving and pushing and then
the puck shot back to the Hammond side. Over to the boards it went, the
Hammond forwards strung out and dug their skates into the ice and the
puck came down to the Ferry Hill goal, flying back and forth from one
forward to another like a shuttle. Chub checked the Hammond right-center
and the two went to the ice together, a confused mass of legs and arms
and sticks