She could scarcely distinguish what Nelson Haley shouted at her, and he was so near, too. He pointed ahead. She stooped to look under the boom and saw a great windrow of snow—a huge drift more than six feet high—not half a mile away.
This drift stretched, it seemed, from side to side of the lake. They could not see what lay beyond it. Janice expected the others would drop the sail and bring the ice boat to a halt. Some roughness in the ice, or perhaps a narrow opening, had caught the first driven flakes of snow here the night before. The snow had gathered rapidly when once a streak of it lay across the lake. Deeper and deeper the drift had grown until tons of the white crystals had been heaped here in what looked to Janice to be an impassable barrier.
"Oh! Oh!" she shrieked. "Won't you stop?"
Nelson Haley smiled grimly and shook his head. Marty uttered a shriek of exultation as the ice boat bore down upon the drift. He was quite speed-mad.
"Hang on! hang on!" commanded Nelson Haley.
Another moment and the frightened Janice saw the bow of the boat rise—as it seemed—straight into the air. Amid the groaning of timbers and the shrieking of the wind, the Fly-by-Night shot up the steep slant of the drift and over its crest!
The cry Janice tried to utter was frozen in her throat. She saw the ice ahead and below them. Like a great bird—or a huge batfish leaping from the sea—the ice boat shot out on a long curve from the summit of the hard-packed snowdrift.
The shock of its return to the ice was terrific. Janice felt sure the boat must be racked to bits.
But the Fly-by-Night was strongly built. With the momentum secured by its leap from the drift, it skated over the ice for a mile or more, with scarcely a thimbleful of wind in its sail, yet traveling like a fast express.
Then it answered the helm again, the wind filled the sail, and they bore down upon the Landing on a direct tack.