"It's more than a hundred miles to Cleveland. Think you could do that in one day? Besides, how would you know the way?"
"Didn't say I could do it in one day. But couldn't we go ashore and stop at night? That's the way the Hall boys did, who skated up to Detroit last winter."
"I read in the newspaper yesterday," said Kate, "that the lake was frozen uncommonly hard, and was solid ice all the way along the shore as far as the headlands of Ashtabula."
"If we could be sure of that," Aleck admitted, "there might be some use in trying; but one can't be sure. Besides, how could we take along our baggage?"
"Pull it on a sled," said Kate, "the way they do in the arctic regions. Men up there just live on the ice, sleep at night and cook their food and travel all day, and they don't have skates either. Gracious! Who can that be?"
No wonder Katy was astonished, for there came echoing through the house a noise as if somebody was pounding the wall down with a stone maul. Aleck hastened to put a stop to it by opening the door.
He was greeted by the grinning face of a round-headed, chunky lad nearly his own age, named Thucydides Montgomery; but as this was too long a name for the Western people, it had been cut down very early in life to "Tug," which everybody saw at once was the right word, on account of the lad's strength and toughness. The mammas of the village thought him a bad boy, getting their information from the small boys of the public school, whom, in his great fondness for joking, he would sometimes frighten and tease.
Aleck knew him better, and knew how brave and goodhearted he was. Jim had good cause to be fond of him, for, in behalf of The Youngster, during his first week at school, Tug had soundly thrashed a bullying tyrant; while Kate gratefully remembered various heavy market-baskets he had carried for her, since he lived near by. A closer tie between our little family and their visitor, however, was the fact that, like them, he was an orphan, and, like them, had relatives in Cleveland, whom he had often thought he should like to be with better than staying with his aunt here in Monore.
When Tug had joined the circle gathered before the big fireplace, and had begun to talk about the brass-works, he was promptly hushed by Aleck.