"To the Landing," begged Janice.

"By jinks! so he can," shouted the boy. "Lemme go, too, Mr. Haley.

You'll want somebody to 'tend sheet on the _Fly-by-Night_."

"But I do not understand?" queried the teacher, staring from one to the other of the excited pair.

"You--you tell him, Marty!" said Janice, turning toward the door. "I must put these beautiful flowers in water. Come in, Mr. Haley, and get warm."

But the teacher remained out there on the windswept porch while he listened to what Marty had to tell. The girl's trouble struck home to the generous-hearted young man. He was moved deeply for her--especially upon a day like this when, in the nature of things, all persons should be joyous and glad.

"I will take you to the Landing, if the breeze holds fair," he declared and he pooh-poohed Mrs. Day's fears that there was any danger in sailing the ice boat. He had come up from the Landing himself the night before in an hour and a half.

"What a dreadful, dreadful way to spend Christmas Day!" moaned Aunt 'Mira, as she helped Janice to dress. "Something's likely to happen to that ice boat. I've seen 'em racing on the lake. Them folks jest take their lives in their han's--that's right!"

"I'll make the boys take care," Janice promised.

Aunt 'Mira saw them go with fear and trembling, and immediately ensconced herself in the window of Janice's room, with a shawl around her shoulders, to watch the flight of the ice boat after it got under way down at the dock.

Janice, and the teacher and Marty had fairly to wade to the sh.o.r.e of the lake. The drifts were very deep on land; but, as Marty said, the wind had swept the ice almost bare. Here and there a ridge of snow had formed upon the glistening surface; but Mr. Haley made light of these obstructions.

"The _Fly-by-Night_ will just go humming through those, Miss Janice.

Don't you fear," he said.

There were few people abroad in High Street, for it was not yet mid-forenoon. Most who were out were busily engaged shoveling paths. The three young folks got down to the dock, and Haley and Marty turned up the heavy body of the ice boat and swept the snow off.

There was a good deal of a drift of snow right along the edge of the lake; but they pushed the ice boat out beyond this windrow, with Janice's help, and then stepped the mast and bent on the heavy sail. It was a cross-T boat, with a short nose and a single sail. The steersman had a box in the rear and in this there was room for Janice to ride, too. The sheet-tender likewise ballasted the boat by lying out on one or the other end of the crosspiece.

There was a keen wind, not exactly fair for the trip down the lake; yet their sheet filled nicely on the longer tack, and the _Fly-by-Night_ swept out from the Poketown dock at a very satisfactory speed.

"We'll hit the Landing in two hours, at the longest, Miss Janice,"

declared Nelson Haley. "Keep your head down. This wind cuts like needles. Too bad you haven't a mask of some kind."

He was wearing his motorcycle goggles, while Marty had one of those plush caps, that pull down all around one's face so that nothing but the eyes peer out, and was doing very well.

As the ice yacht gathered speed, Janice found that she could not face the wind. Nor could she look ahead, for the sun was shining boldly now, and the glare of it on the ice was all but blinding.

The timbers of the boat groaned and shook. The runners whined over the ice with an ever-increasing note. Ice-dust rose in a thin cloud from the sharp shoes, and the sunlight, in which the dust danced, flecked the mist with dazzling, rainbow colors.

When the ice boat came about, it was with a leap and bound that seemed almost to capsize the craft. Janice had never traveled so fast before--or so she believed. It fairly took her breath, and she clung to the hand-holds with all her strength.

"Hi, Janice!" yelled Marty, grinning from ear to ear. "How d'ye like it?

Gittin' scaret?"

She had to shake her head negatively and smile. But to tell the truth there was an awful sinking in her heart, and when one runner went suddenly over a hummock and tipped the ice boat, she could scarcely keep from voicing her alarm.

CHAPTER XIX

CHRISTMAS, AFTER ALL!

Janice Day possessed more self-control than most girls of her age. She would not, even when her heart was sick with apprehension because of the story in the newspaper, give her cousin the opportunity of saying that she showed the white feather.

She lay close to the beam of the ice boat, clung to the hand-holds, and made no outcry as the craft flew off upon the other tack. Had the wind been directly astern, the course of the _Fly-by-Night_ would have been smoother. It was the terrific bounding, and the groaning of the timbers while the boom swung over and the canvas slatted, that really frightened the girl.

It seemed as though the mast must be wrenched out of the boat by the force of the high wind filling the canvas. And the shrieking of the runners! Janice realized that the pa.s.sage of an ice boat made as much noise as the flight of a fast train.

She could scarcely distinguish what Nelson Haley shouted at her, and he was so near, too. He pointed ahead. She stooped to look under the boom and saw a great windrow of snow--a huge drift more than six feet high--not half a mile away.

This drift stretched, it seemed, from side to side of the lake. They could not see what lay beyond it. Janice expected the others would drop the sail and bring the ice boat to a halt. Some roughness in the ice, or perhaps a narrow opening, had caught the first driven flakes of snow here the night before. The snow had gathered rapidly when once a streak of it lay across the lake. Deeper and deeper the drift had grown until tons of the white crystals had been heaped here in what looked to Janice to be an impa.s.sable barrier.

"Oh! Oh!" she shrieked. "Won't you stop?"

Nelson Haley smiled grimly and shook his head. Marty uttered a shriek of exultation as the ice boat bore down upon the drift. _He_ was quite speed-mad.

"Hang on! hang on!" commanded Nelson Haley.

Another moment and the frightened Janice saw the bow of the boat rise--as it seemed--straight into the air. Amid the groaning of timbers and the shrieking of the wind, the _Fly-by-Night_ shot up the steep slant of the drift and over its crest!

The cry Janice tried to utter was frozen in her throat. She saw the ice ahead and below them. Like a great bird--or a huge batfish leaping from the sea--the ice boat shot out on a long curve from the summit of the hard-packed snowdrift.

The shock of its return to the ice was terrific. Janice felt sure the boat must be racked to bits.

But the _Fly-by-Night_ was strongly built. With the momentum secured by its leap from the drift, it skated over the ice for a mile or more, with scarcely a thimbleful of wind in its sail, yet traveling like a fast express.

Then it answered the helm again, the wind filled the sail, and they bore down upon the Landing on a direct tack.

"Gee! Ain't it great?" cried Marty, as Nelson Haley signaled him to drop the sail. "Don't that beat any traveling you ever done, Janice?"

Janice faintly admitted that it did; but neither the boy nor Nelson Haley realized what a trial the trip had been to the girl. Janice was too proud to show the fear she felt; but she could scarcely stand when the _Fly-by-Night_ finally stopped with its nose to the sh.o.r.e, just beyond the steamboat dock.

Popham Landing was scarcely larger than Poketown; only there were canning factories here, and the terminus of the narrow-gauge railroad on which Janice had finished her rail journey from Greensboro the spring before. So it was a livelier place than the village in which the girl had been living for eight months.

Colonel Van Dyne, owner of one of the canning factories, had a fine home on the heights overlooking the lake. It was with the colonel's gardener and superintendent that Nelson Haley had an acquaintance, and through that acquaintanceship had obtained the cut flowers from the colonel's greenhouse.

When the three had hurried up the half-cleared landing to the railroad station, Janice fairly staggering between her two companions, the office was closed and n.o.body was about the railroad premises. It was a holiday, and no more trains were expected at the Landing until night.

Janice all but broke down at this added bad turn of affairs. To come all this distance only to be balked!

"It's jest blamed _mean_!" sputtered Marty. "Telegraph shops ain't got no right to shut up--in the daytime, too."

"It's not a Western Union wire," explained Nelson. "The railroad only takes ordinary messages as a matter of convenience. But wait! That door's open and there's a fire in the waiting-room, you see. Just because this card says the agent and operator won't be here till five o'clock doesn't mean that he's gone out of town. Besides, I'll see my friend, Jim Watrous."

This was the gardener and general factotum at Colonel Van Dyne's. The Poketown school-teacher hurried away, and left Janice and Marty sitting together in the railroad station.

"He'll find some way--don't you fear, Janice," said the boy, with much more sympathy than he had ever shown before. Janice squeezed his hand and hid her own face. She could not forget how Marty had tried the evening before to hide the knowledge of her father's fate from her.

_This_ was a much different Marty than the boy she had first met at the old Day house on her arrival at Poketown.