The races were at night, for it was then that there could be the most brilliant display upon the ice. A thousand electric lamps, the power supplied from the trolley company’s plant up the river, aided a cold and brilliant December moon in illuminating the icefield that night.
Other races had been held before, and hockey games and other sports; but nothing previously arranged drew so great a crowd as the Rivercliff School ice sports. The school was the most popular establishment in that part of the State, and the largest. The sports drew the friends of the school for many miles around, as well as hundreds from Jackson City, and practically all of the hamlet at Rivercliff landing that could get to the riverside without the aid of crutches.
Larry had remained for this event. Indeed, it being but two days to the closing of the term, he had planned a surprise for Beth—and that surprise had been confided only to Miss Hammersly, for her permission had to be obtained.
First came the races, however; and that glorious night would long be remembered in the annals of Rivercliff School. “It will be sung in song and story,” Molly Granger proclaimed, afterward.
“How can it be ‘sung in story,’ Granger?” demanded one carping critic.
“In recitative,” responded Molly, quickly.
Molly herself was a contestant in several of the events of the evening. She was not a very rapid skater; but she was sure on her skates, and she had learned many fancy strokes. One of her best feats was when she and Stella Price waltzed very prettily together on the ice.
It was the fifty and the one hundred yard dashes, and the two-mile race around a measured oval on the ice, that held the deepest attention of the throng that had come to view these trials of speed. The dashes were from a flying start, of course. In the fifty yard Beth was second; in the hundred yard she was first—by a good lead. Later, when the contestants for the two-mile race were started, she was one of the favorites.
There were twenty starters, and they were all good skaters. The little, dark, ugly girl, Laura Hedden, who had been such a friend of Maude Grimshaw, was next to Beth in the line.
Spitefulness breeds spitefulness. Laura could not have told why she “hated that Baldwin girl;” but she had been so well taught by the absent Maude that she considered Beth her particular enemy now.