Loud laughter followed these cheers. The people on the shore remained discreetly silent.
“Three groans for the Poquette Railro'd!”
The hoarse cries rang out on the crisp night wind, and at the close one of those queer, splitting, wide-reaching, booming crackles, heard in the winter on big waters, spread across the lake from shore to shore.
“Even the old lake's with us!” a woodsman shouted.
Connick and his men had finished what they had come to Sunkhaze to do. They climbed aboard the huge ice-craft. The sheet was paid off, and with dragging peavey-sticks instead of centerboard to hold the contrivance into the wind, the boat moved away on its tack across the lake.
“Say good-by to your friend here!” Connick bellowed. “He says he thinks he'll go with us, strange country for to see.”
“Tell inquirin' admirers that his address in futur' will be north pole, shady side,” another rough humorist added.
The men on the shore did not reply. They understood perfectly the uncertain temper of “larking” woodsmen. There had been cases in times past when a taunting word had turned rude jollity into sour hankering for revenge.
The bottle began to go about on the sleds, and the refrain of a lumberman's chorus, with its riotous, “Whoop fa la larry, lo day!” came floating back to Sunkhaze long after the great sail had merged itself with the silvery radiance of the brilliant surface of the lake.
“Apparently there's other folks as have new schemes of travellin' acrost Spinnaker Lake,” observed the postmaster, breaking a long silence in the group of spectators. “Wal, I did all I could to post him on what he might expect when Gid Ward got his temper good an' started. It's too bad to see that property dumped that way, tho.”