The Corner House Girls Snowbound

“Goodness, Neale!” giggled Agnes. “Did you ever kill a flea with a hammer?”

“Yep. Sand-flea,” he assured her, grinning. “Oh! I’m one quick lad, Aggie.”

She really thought he was joking, however, until she had looked into two or three of the huts. People really did live in them, as she saw. In the middle of the plank floors was a well, with open water kept clear of frost. The set-lines were fastened to pegs in the planks and the “flags” announced when a fish was on the hook.

A smiling woman, done up like an Eskimo, invited them into one shack. She had evidently not seen the scooter arrive from down the lake and thought the boy and girl had walked out from Coxford.

“Hello!” she said. “Goin’ to try your hands at fishin’? You’re town folks, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” said Agnes, politely. “We come from Milton.”

“Lawsy! That’s a fur ways,” said the woman. She was peeling potatoes, and a kettle was boiling on the stove at one side. The visitors knew by the odor that there was corned beef in the pot. “You goin’ to try your hands?” the woman repeated.

“No,” said Neale. “We are with a party that is going up to Red Deer Lodge.”

“Oh! That’s the Birdsall place. You can’t git up there tonight. It’s too fur.”

“I guess we shall stay in Coxford,” admitted Neale.

“Didn’t know but you an’ your sister wanted to fish. Old Manny Cox got ketched with rheumatics so that he had to give up fishin’ this season. I can hire you his shanty.”

“No, thank you!” murmured Agnes, her eyes round with interest.

“I let it for a week or more to two gals,” said the woman complacently. “Got five dollars out of ’em for Manny. He’ll be needin’ the money. Better stay awhile and try the fishin’.”

“Goodness! Two girls alone?” asked Agnes.

“Yes. Younger’n you are, too. But they knowed their way around, I guess,” said the woman. “Good lookin’ gals. Nice clo’es. Town folks, I guess. Mebbe they wasn’t older’n my Bob, and he’s just turned twelve.”

“Twelve years old! And two girls alone?” murmured Agnes.

“Oh, there ain’t nobody to hurt you here. We don’t never need no constable out here on the ice. There’s plenty of women folks – Miz’ Ashtable, and Hank Crummet’s wife, and Mary Boley and her boys. Oh, lots o’ women here. We can help make money in the winter.

“There! See that set-line bob?”

She dropped the potato she was paring and crossed to the well. One of the flags had dipped. With a strong hand she reeled in the wet line. At its end was a big pickerel – the biggest pickerel the visitors had ever seen.

“There!” exclaimed the woman. “Sorry I didn’t git that before Joe Jagson went with his load of fish. That’s four pound if it weighs an ounce.”

She shook the flopping fish off the hook into a basket and then hung the basket outside the door. In the frosty air the fish did not need to be packed in ice. It would literally be ice within a very few minutes.

“Got to hang ’em up to keep the dogs from gettin’ them,” said the woman, rebaiting the hook and then returning to her potato paring. “Can’t leave ’em in a creel in the water, neither; pike would come along an’ eat ’em clean to the bone.”

“Oh!” gasped Agnes.

“Yes. Regular cannibals, them pike,” said the woman. “But all big fish will eat little ones.”

“What kind of fish do you catch?” Neale asked.

“Pickerel and pike, whitebait (we calls ’em that), perch, some lake bass and once in a while a lake trout. Trout’s out o’ season. We don’t durst sell ’em. But we eat ’em. They ain’t no ‘season,’ I tell ’em, for a boy’s appetite; and I got three boys and my man to feed.”

At that moment there was a great shouting and barking of dogs outside, and Neale and Agnes went out of the hut to learn what it meant. The Corner House girl whispered to the boy:

“What do you think about those two twelve year old girls coming here to stay and fish through the ice?”

“Great little sports,” commented Neale.

“Well,” exclaimed Agnes, “that’s being too much of a sport, if you ask me!”

CHAPTER IX – A COLD SCENT

The barking of the dogs was in answer to the booming note that Tom Jonah sent echoing across the ice. Agnes and Neale found that the two big ice-boats were near at hand.

As one of the crew of Mr. Howbridge’s boat owned the scooter that Neale and Agnes had come up the lake on, that owner wished to recover his abandoned ice-boat. Besides, it was not more than two miles over the ice to Coxford, and the wind was going down with the sun. The big boats would have made slow work of it beating in to the slab-town on the western shore of the lake.

Neale and Agnes ran out across the ice to meet their friends. Most of the party were glad indeed to get on their feet, for the ride up the lake had been a cold one.

In fact, Tess could scarcely walk when she got out of her seat, and Dot tumbled right down on the ice, almost weeping.

“I – I guess I haven’t got any feet,” the smallest Corner House girl half sobbed. “I can’t feel ’em.”

“Course you’ve got feet, Dot,” said Sammy, staggering a good deal himself when he walked toward her. “Just you jump up and down like this,” and he proceeded to follow his own advice.

“But won’t we break through the ice?” murmured the smallest Corner House girl.

“Why, Dot! do you s’pose,” demanded Tess, “that you can jump hard enough to break through two feet of ice?”

“Well, I never tried it before, did I?” demanded Dot. “How should I know what might happen to the old ice?”

Agnes hurried the little ones over to the shanty of the friendly fisher-woman, where they could get warm and be sheltered from the raw wind that still puffed down in gusts from the hills.

Tom Jonah had jumped out of the cockpit of the ice-boat and found himself immediately in the middle of what Luke Shepard called “a fine ruction.”

“Canines to right of him, canines to left of him, volleyed and thundered!” laughed the college youth. “Hey! call off your fish-hounds, or Tom Jonah will eat them up.”

One cur was already running away yelping and limping; the others took notice that the old dog had powerful jaws. But Ruth insisted that Tom Jonah be put on a leash, and Luke meekly obeyed. Indeed, he was likely to do almost anything that the oldest Corner House girl told him to do, “right up to jumping through the ring of a doughnut!” his sister whispered to Mrs. MacCall in great glee.

“Well, my lassie,” was the housekeeper’s comment, “he might be mindin’ a much worse mistress than our Ruthie.”

Nothing that Ruth could or did do in most matters was wrong in Mrs. MacCall’s opinion, even if she did criticize the Kenways’ charity. If Luke Shepard some day expected to get Ruth for his wife, the housekeeper considered that it was only right he should first learn to obey Ruth’s behests in all things.

Ruth had a word to say to Neale and Agnes at this time. She pointed out to those two restless and reckless younger ones that there must be no such venturesome escapades during the remainder of this winter vacation as that connected with the ice-scooter.

“If you have no respect for your own bones, think of our feelings,” she concluded. “Why! I almost had heart disease when I saw that horrid scooter fly past with Agnes up in the air as though she were on a flying trapeze.”

“Shucks, Ruth!” said Neale, “you know I wouldn’t let any harm come to Aggie.”

“Now, Neale,” returned the older girl, “how would you keep her from getting hurt if that ice-boat broke in two, for instance?”