When Joe and Harry reached the lake front they found a crowd of fully fifty men and boys, with a fair sprinkling of girls, engaged in skating and in ice-boating. The majority of the people were in the vicinity of the steamboat dock, for this was at the end of the main street, and a great “hanging-out” spot during the summer. But others were skating up the lake shore, and a few were following Dan Marcy’s new ice yacht, Silver Queen, as she tacked along on her way to the west shore, where an arm of the lake encircled the lower end of Pine Island.
“Marcy’s going to try to beat the lake record,” Joe heard one boy call to another. “He says his new boat has got to knock the spots out of anything that ever sailed on the lake, or he’ll chop her up for firewood.”
“Well, she’ll have to hum along if she beats the time made by the old Whizzer last winter,” came from the other boy. “She sailed from the big pine to Hallett’s Point in exactly four minutes and ten seconds. My, but didn’t she scoot along!”
It took but a few minutes for Joe and Harry to don their skates. As they left the shore they ran into Fred Rush, who was swinging along as if his very life depended upon it.
“Hello, so you fellows have come down at last!” sang out Fred, who was short and stout, and as full of fun as a lad can be. “Thought you had made up your mind to go to bed again, or stay home and look for more Christmas presents. Been having dead loads of fun—had a race and come in second best, got knocked down twice, slipped on the ice over yonder, and got a wet foot in a hole some fellow cut, and Jerry Little hit me in the shin with his hockey stick. Say, but you fellows are positively missing the time of your lives.”
“I want to miss it, if I’m going to have all those things happen to me,” returned Joe, dryly. Then he added: “Harry tells me you got a double-barreled shotgun almost like mine. How do you like it?”
“Like it? Say, that gun is the greatest thing that ever happened. I tried it just before I came down to skate—fired both barrels at once, because I didn’t have time to fire ’em separately. It knocked me flat, and a snowbank was all that saved my life. But she’s a dandy. I’m going to bring down a bear with that gun before the winter is over, you see if I don’t.”
“How are you going to do it?” put in Harry. “Offer to let the animal shoot off the gun, and kill him that way?”
“Don’t you make fun of me, Harry. You’ll see the bear sooner or later, mark the remark.”
The three boys skated off, hand in hand, with Fred in the center. The fun-loving youth was the only son of the town hardware dealer, and he and the Westmore lads had grown up together from childhood. At school Fred had proved himself far from being a dunce, but by some manner of means he was almost constantly in “hot water;” why, nobody could explain.