Beech obliged, but lift shots weren’t successful for him, and presently he went back to his first style, that of skating in close to goal and snapping the puck so quickly to one side or the other that it was difficult for Toby to move fast enough to block it. Once, being caught too far to one side of the cage, he tried to stop the puck with his stick blade and learned a lesson. For the puck jumped over the blade and rolled to the back of the net. Three times out of a dozen or so shots, Beech tallied in that fashion. Then Toby worked out the solution. The next time, when Beech came swinging up――he could shoot almost as well left-handed as right――Toby dashed out to meet him, a proceeding so unexpected to Beech that he almost forgot to shoot. When he did the puck bounded off Toby’s knee and skimmed off to the side of the rink. “Huh!” grunted Beech. “I wondered how long you’d let me do that. Just the same, you don’t want to try that trick very often, Tucker, or you’ll come to grief. If there’d been some one with me I’d simply have passed, you see.” They stopped a minute and talked that over. Beech seemed to have a good deal of hockey sense, Toby thought, and the older boy decided that young Tucker was a pretty brainy lad. Toward the last of the practice Mr. Loring appeared and watched interestedly. “Beech,” he said finally, “take some shots from about five yards away, please. You don’t need to skate. Work right around in a half-circle shooting from the different angles. Let’s see what Tucker’s weakest point is.” It developed that Toby’s principal weakness was in meeting shots made from that arc of the circle lying to his left. In other words, as Mr. Loring pointed out, an opposing right wing would stand a better chance of scoring through Toby than a left wing would. “You’re right-handed, Tucker,” he said. “You can’t afford to be. Learn to use your left hand and the left side generally as easily and quickly as your right. Try it again, Beech.” And then, after Toby had stopped the puck none too cleverly, he followed with: “See what I mean, Tucker? When the puck comes at you from your right or from the center you meet it nicely, but when it comes to you from where Beech is shooting you have trouble. You don’t cross as naturally from right to left as you do vice versa and you don’t handle your body as well. To-morrow you’d better pay a good deal of attention to shots from that side. Practice swinging across from the right post to the left. If you keep your knee against the post and push out with it when you want to cross you’ll get a quicker start. Try it now. That’s pretty good. But you favor your right too much. A good goal-tend mustn’t know one side from the other. It wouldn’t take long for an enemy to discover your weakness, Tucker, and they’d pound you from the right――that is, your left――till the cows come home. Look here, what about those gloves? Didn’t you say you were going to get some decent ones?”