The Corner House Girls Snowbound

CHAPTER VII – THE SCOOTER

Sammy Pinkney had desired greatly to go with Neale and Agnes on the smaller ice-boat; but they would not hear to the proposal. He struck up an acquaintance with the “crew” of the big boat to which he was assigned, and gave Ruth and Luke Shepard no trouble.

In the other large boat Mr. Howbridge, Mrs. MacCall and the two smallest Corner House girls, as well as Tom Jonah, were very cozily ensconced. Dot clutched the Alice-doll very tightly and Tom Jonah barked loudly when the barge slithered out upon the lake and began to gather speed as the fresh wind filled the big sail.

Mrs. MacCall continued to have her doubts regarding the safety of this strange means of locomotion.

“There’s one good thing about it,” she chattered, as the sledge jarred over a few hummocks. “There’s nae so far to fall if we do fall out.”

“It’s perfectly safe, they tell me,” Mr. Howbridge assured her.

“Aye. It may look so,” the good woman admitted. “But ’tis like Tam Taggart goin’ to London.”

“How was that?” the lawyer asked, smiling.

“Tam was one o’ these canny Highlanders, and he made up his mind after muckle thought to spend a week in London. He went to ‘broaden his mind,’ as they call it. Truly, to prove to himself that London and the English were quite as bad as he’d believed all his life.

“So he goes to London, and he comes home again – very solemn like. Nobody could get a word out of him at first,” pursued Mrs. MacCall. “Finally the folks, they gathered around him at the post-office and one says:

“‘What ails ye, Tam? Ye’ve no told us anything aboot Lunnon. Is it nae the fine place they’d have us believe?’

“‘Oo, aye, ’tis nae so bad,’ says Tam. ‘But they are nae honest up there.’

“‘Whit way air they no honest, Tam?’ asks his friends.

“‘Weel,’ says Tam, ‘I aye had my doots all the time; but I made sure the day I bought me a penny-packet of needles. On the outside o’ it, it said there was one thousand needles inside.’

“‘Oh, aye?’

“‘I coonted ’em,’ says Tam, ‘an’ – wad ye believe it? – there was only nine hundred and ninety-three!’ And this boat-sliding may look all right,” concluded the Corner House housekeeper, “but, like Tam, ‘I have me doots!’”

As the boat gathered speed, following the one on which Ruth and her companions sailed out into the open lake, the little girls squealed their delight. Even Dot forgot her fears. And Tom Jonah “smiled” just as broadly as he could.

“Oh, Tessie!” Dot gasped. “It is like flying! My breath’s too big for my mouth – just like I was in a swing.”

“I guess you must feel like poor Sandyface did when Sammy sent her with her kittens from our house to his in the fly-a-majig. You remember?” said Tess.

“I should say I did!” agreed Dot in her old-fashioned way. “What an awful time that was, wasn’t it? And Sammy got spanked.”

“Sammy’s always getting spanked,” Tess said coolly.

“Ye-as. He is. But I guess he’s never got used to it yet,” responded the smallest Corner House girl thoughtfully.

The wind, when they faced forward, almost took their breath. The little girls cowered down under the warm robes, looking astern. So their bright eyes were the first to catch sight of the scooter shooting out into the lake behind them.

The wharves and dun-colored houses of Culberton were already far astern. And how fast the town was receding!

The smaller ice-boat, however, overtook the big boats almost as though the latter were standing still! The others caught sight of the careening ice-racer soon after Dot and Tess first shouted. But neither of the little girls nor the other members of the party realized that Neale and Agnes were aboard the craft that came, meteor-like, up the lake.

They had started sedately enough, Neale O’Neil at the stern with the tiller ropes in his mittened hands and Agnes strapped into the seat on the outrigger, with the bight of the running sheet in her charge.

Neale had told her plainly what to do ordinarily, and had instructed her to look to him for orders in any emergency. It looked to be very simple, this working out an ice-scooter that had in it the possibility of sailing at any speed up to a hundred miles an hour!

Somebody had started the creaking boat with the purchase of a pike pole at the rear. The peavy bit into the ice, and the scooter rocked out from the wharf. The big sail was already spread. They had wabbled out of the confinement of the dock slowly and sedately enough.

Suddenly the wind puffed into the sail and bellied it. The stick bent and groaned. It seemed as though the runners stuck to the surface of the ice and the mast would be torn from the framework of the craft.

Then she really started!

The powerful on-thrust of the wind in the sail shot the scooter away from the shore. She swooped like a gull across the ice. The whining of steel on ice rose to a painful shriek in Agnes’ ears.

She was scared. Oh, yes, she was scared! But she would not admit it – not for worlds! Faster and faster the scooter moved. The girl looked back once at Neale and caught a glimpse of his confident smile. It heartened her wonderfully.

“Hold hard, Aggie!” his strong voice shouted, and she nodded, blinking the water out of her eyes.

They had headed up Long Lake as they left the shore, and they could travel on the wind, and without tacking, for a long way. They overhauled the two big barges in which the rest of the party sailed, in a way that fairly made Agnes gasp. She had never traveled so fast before in all her life.

The scooter struck a hummock in the ice. It was not six inches above the general level of the crystal surface of the lake. But the impetus it gave the ice-boat sent that seemingly fragile craft up into the air! She left the ice for a long, breathtaking, humming jump. It seemed to Agnes as though they were going right up into the air, very much as an aeroplane soars from the earth.

Indeed, had the ice-boat a movable tail like an aeroplane, surely it would completely take to the air. Next to piloting an aeroplane, ice-boat racing is the greatest sport in the world.

Spang! The scooter took to the ice again and ran like a scared rabbit. The stays sang a new tune. Had the sheet not had a simple cast about a peg beside her, Agnes would surely have lost the bight of it.

But Neale had told her certain things to do, and she would not fail him. Through half-blinded eyes she cast another glance at him over her shoulder. The boy showed no evidence of panic, and Agnes was ashamed to display her own inner feelings.

When Neale said, “You’re a regular little sport, Aggie!” it was the finest tribute to character that Agnes Kenway knew anything about. She was determined to win his approval now, if never before.

Ruth saw them coming, but had no idea at first that the careening ice-racer was the small boat that Neale and her sister had engaged for the run up the lake. The schooner came on like, and with, the wind!

“See that boat, Cecile!” cried the oldest Corner House girl. “How reckless it is to ride so fast. Suppose the mast should snap or a skate should break? My!”

“But look how they fly!” agreed her friend.

“Hey!” exclaimed Luke. “That’s Neale O’Neil steering that thing.”

“Oh! Mercy! Agnes!” shrieked Ruth, her eyes suddenly opened to the identity of the two on the scooter.

“Hoorah!” yelled Luke. “What speed!”

The party on the other big boat had recognized the two on the scooter. The fur-trimmed coat and brilliant-hued hood Agnes wore could not be mistaken.

“Stop them! Stop them!” moaned Ruth, really alarmed.

It seemed to her that the boat she was riding in was going much too fast for safety; but the scooter flew up the lake at a pace that made the big boats seem to stand still.

Neale plainly knew how to handle the racer. He passed the two barges and then tacked, aiming to cross the bows of the bigger craft.

Instantly, as the boom swung around, Agnes’ end of the crossbeam went into the air! They saw her sail upward, the flashing steel runners at least four feet above the ice!

The girl’s wind-whipped face was still smiling. Indeed, that smile seemed frozen on. As the racer rushed by Agnes looked down upon her sisters and other friends and waved one hand to them.

Then, like a huge kite, the big-bellied sail raced off across the lake, taking the reckless pair almost instantly out of earshot.

CHAPTER VIII – THE VILLAGE ON THE ICE

The wild plunge of the scooter across the lake carried it, before a wind-squall, far out of hearing of Ruth Kenway’s voice. Yet she shouted long and loud after her sister. Luke pulled her back into her seat when she would have stood up to watch the careening scooter.

“They are in no danger,” he urged. “Take it easy, Ruth.”

“Why, they must be in peril! Did you see her – Agnes – up in the air?”

“Well, she’s down again all right now, Ruthie,” said Cecile Shepard soothingly.

“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.”

“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!”