"Oh, Neale, come back!" wailed Agnes.
"You hear, Neale O'Neil?" gasped Clarence, struggling in the bigger boy's grasp. "I don't want to go!"
"Show me where the trap is," said the boy who had been brought up in a circus. "Then you can run if you like. I'm not afraid."
"I am!" squealed Clarence Bimberg.
But he was forced by the stronger Neale to skate under the burning wharf. They bumped about for half a minute among the piles and the broken ice. They could hear the flames crackling overhead, and the smoke puffed in between the planks. The black ice was solid and there was light enough to see fairly well.
"There! There!" shrieked the frightened Clarence. "You can see it now, Neale! Let me go!"
It did not look like a trap-door to Neale. Yet some short, rotting steps led up out of the frozen water to the flooring of the old wharf. The moment he essayed to climb these steps on his skates, Clarence broke away and shot out from under the burning dock.
Neale was too determined to reach the interior of Seneca Sprague's shack to save the old prophet's books, to bother about the defection of his schoolmate. If Joe Eldred had only been at hand, he would have stood by!
"Oh, Neale! can you open it?" quavered a voice behind and below him.
Neale almost tumbled backward from the steps, he was so amazed. He looked down to see Agnes' rosy, troubled face turned up to his gaze.