The Corner House Girls Snowbound

“Oh, if I had only known!”

“Known what?” asked Luke, inclined to grin if the truth was told.

“That the small boat would sail like that. Why, it is worse than a racing automobile!”

“Faster, I guess. Almost as fast as a motorcycle,” Luke agreed. “But Neale’s managed one of those things before. He told me all about it.”

“But why didn’t somebody tell me about it?” demanded Ruth rather stormily.

“Tell you about what?” asked Cecile.

“About how fast that reckless thing would sail? Why! I’d never have allowed Aggie to ride on it in this world.”

In the other big ice-boat there was much anxiety as well. Mr. Howbridge and Mrs. MacCall would have stopped the reckless ones could they have done so, and Tom Jonah was barking his head off. He, too, had recognized Agnes and Neale and believed that all was not right with them.

The scooter, however, was clear across the lake again; they saw it tack once more, and this time, because of the favoring breeze, Neale headed her directly up the lake. Every minute he and Agnes on their racer were leaving the rest of the party behind.

These scooters cannot be sailed at a slow pace. The skeleton craft is so light, and the sail so big, that the least puff of breeze drives it ahead at railroad speed.

Now with a pretty steady breeze behind them, the scooter was bound to “show off.” Nor did the young people realize just how fast they sailed, or how perilous their course looked to their friends.

“We’re running away from them!” Agnes managed to throw back over her shoulder at Neale.

“Can’t help it!” he cried in return. “This old scooter has taken the bit in its teeth.”

Agnes had begun to enjoy the speed to the full now. Why! this was better than motoring over the finest kind of oiled road. And the young girl did like to travel fast.

She began to see that the farther they went up Long Lake the wilder the shores appeared to be and the fewer houses there were visible. Here and there was a little village, with a white-steepled church pointing heavenward among the almost black spruce and pine. Again, a cleared farm showed forth, its fields sheeted with snow.

The lake was quite ten miles broad in most places, and occasionally it spread to a width of more than twice that number of miles. Then they could barely see the hazy shoreline at all.

“We could not be lonesomer,” thought Agnes, “if we were sailing on the ocean!”

The sails behind them had all disappeared. Once a squad of timber barges with square sails was passed. The barges were going up empty to the head of the lake there to be loaded and await a favoring breeze to bring them back to Culberton again. It was much cheaper for the lumber concerns to sail the logs down the lake if they could, than to load them on the narrow gauge railroad and pay freight to Culberton. The sticks had to be handled at the foot of the lake, anyway.

The scooter went past these slowly sailing barges almost as rapidly as they had passed the two boats in which sailed the remainder of the Corner House party. The stays creaked and the steel whined on the ice, while the wind boomed in the big sail like a muffled drum.

The sun, hazy and red like the face of a haymaker in harvest time, was going westward and would soon disappear behind the mountain ridge which followed the shoreline of the lake, but at a distance. It was up in the foothills of those mountains that Red Deer Lodge was located.

After passing the empty barges the boy and girl on the scooter saw no other sail nor anything which excited their attention until Agnes suddenly beheld a group of objects on the ice near the western shore of the lake, not many miles ahead.

She began almost immediately to wonder what these things could be, but she could not make Neale O’Neil understand the question she shouted to him. By and by, however, she saw for herself that the objects were a number of little huts, and that they really were built upon the frozen surface of the lake.

Agnes was naturally very much interested in this strange sight. A village on the ice was something quite novel to her mind. She desired very much to ask questions of Neale, but the wind was too great and they were sailing too fast for her to make her desire known to her boy friend.

So she just used her eyes (when they did not water too much) and stared at the strange collection of huts and its vicinity with all her might. Why! from lengths of stove pipe through some of the slanting roofs, smoke was climbing into the hazy atmosphere.

Back of the ice-village, on the steep western shore of the lake, was built a regular town of slab shanties, with a slab church, stores, and the like. Quite a village, this, and when Agnes looked back at Neale questioningly and pointed to them, he shouted: “Coxford.” So she knew it was their destination.

Mr. Howbridge had said they would disembark from the ice-boats at Coxford, and there would take sledges into the woods. It was fast growing toward evening, however, and Agnes knew it would be too late when they landed to continue the journey to Red Deer Lodge before the next morning.

The ice-village was about two miles out from the shore. There were half a hundred huts, some a dozen feet square. But for the most part they were much smaller. They had doors, but no windows, and, as the scooter drew swiftly nearer, Agnes could see that the structures were little more than wind-breaks.

There were a number of people moving about the settlement of huts, however, and not a few children among them, as well as dogs. As the scooter drew near she saw, too, a team of horses drawing a sledge. This sledge was being loaded with boxes, or crates; and what those boxes could contain began to puzzle Agnes as much as anything else she saw about the queer village.

Neale steered outside the line of the ice settlement; but once beyond it he brought the scooter up into the wind and yelled at Agnes to let go the sheet and falls. She loosened the lines from the pegs and allowed them to slip. Down came the shaking canvas, the wooden hoops clattering together as they slid down the greased mast. In a moment the speed of the scooter was lost and they were all but smothered in the fallen canvas.

“Get out from under!” Neale’s voice shouted.

He dropped off at the stern and ran to the girl’s aid. He unbuckled the belt that had secured Agnes to her seat on the outrigger all this while, and fairly dragged her from under the flapping sail.

“Fine work!” Neale shouted, his voice full of laughter. “We made record time. But I’ll let somebody else furl that sail.”

“Oh, Neale!” gasped the girl, hobbling like a cripple. “I ca – can’t walk. I’m frozen stiff!”

“Come on to the shanties. We’ll get warm. Take hold here, Aggie. You’ll be all right in a few minutes.”

“Oh, dear!” she said. “I did not know I was so cold. But what a race it was, Neale! Ruth will give us fits.”

“Won’t she?” chuckled Neale.

“But what is this place, Neale?” Agnes went on. “What are these people doing here?”

“Fishing. Those are frozen fish they are loading on that sledge. Oh! There it goes! We can’t get ashore on that, after all.”

“‘Fishing’?” repeated the amazed girl. “How do they fish through the ice? I don’t see any holes.”

“No. The holes wouldn’t stay open long, as cold as it is out here. It’s about twenty below zero right now, my lady, and I’m keeping a sharp eye on your nose.”

“Oh! Oh!” gasped Agnes, putting her mittened hand tentatively to her nose. “Is that why you told me to keep my collar up over my mouth and nose?”

“It is!” declared the boy, rubbing his own face vigorously. “If you see any white spot on anybody’s face up here in this weather, grab a handful of snow and begin rubbing the spot.”

“Mercy!” Agnes murmured, with a gay little laugh. “Lucky Trix Severn doesn’t come up here. She uses rice powder dreadfully, and folks would think she was being frost-bitten.”

“Uh-huh!” agreed Neale.

“But you haven’t told me how they fish,” said the girl, as they approached nearer to the huts and she was able to walk better.

“Through the ice of course,” he laughed. “Only you don’t see the holes. They are inside the huts.”

“You don’t mean it, Neale?”

“To be sure I mean it! Some of those big shanties house whole families. You see there are children and dogs. They have pot stoves which warm the huts to a certain degree, and on which they cook. And they have bunks built against the walls, with plenty of bedding.”

“Why, I should think they would get their death of cold!” gasped the girl.

“That’s just what they don’t get,” Neale rejoined. “You can bet there are no ‘white plague’ patients here. This atmosphere will kill tubercular germs like a hammer kills a flea.”