As one of the crew of Mr. Howbridge’s boat owned the scooter that Neale and Agnes had come up the lake on, that owner wished to recover his abandoned ice-boat. Besides, it was not more than two miles over the ice to Coxford, and the wind was going down with the sun. The big boats would have made slow work of it beating in to the slab-town on the western shore of the lake.
Neale and Agnes ran out across the ice to meet their friends. Most of the party were glad indeed to get on their feet, for the ride up the lake had been a cold one.
In fact, Tess could scarcely walk when she got out of her seat, and Dot tumbled right down on the ice, almost weeping.
“I—I guess I haven’t got any feet,” the smallest Corner House girl half sobbed. “I can’t feel ’em.”
“Course you’ve got feet, Dot,” said Sammy, staggering a good deal himself when he walked toward her. “Just you jump up and down like this,” and he proceeded to follow his own advice.
“But won’t we break through the ice?” murmured the smallest Corner House girl.
“Why, Dot! do you s’pose,” demanded Tess, “that you can jump hard enough to break through two feet of ice?”
“Well, I never tried it before, did I?” demanded Dot. “How should I know what might happen to the old ice?”
Agnes hurried the little ones over to the shanty of the friendly fisher-woman, where they could get warm and be sheltered from the raw wind that still puffed down in gusts from the hills.
Tom Jonah had jumped out of the cockpit of the ice-boat and found himself immediately in the middle of what Luke Shepard called “a fine ruction.”