The snow mountain was only a little way off, and upon its summit some dark object seemed to move as if fluttering in the wind.
“You go ahead,” said Jack Frost, “and I’ll be with you in a minute. I forgot to stop up that hole you fellows dug in the glacier. If the Equator ever gets in there he’ll destroy the whole thing again in a second.”
“All right,” said Billy; “but don’t be long, for I may need help.”
Jack Frost turned back, and Billy set out alone for the snow mountain, and soon got close enough to get a good view.
At first he was overjoyed, for upon the mountain he saw the Evening Star, and he felt that the long quest for her was as good as ended.
A few steps further, however, brought him to the brink of a circular abyss, too wide to leap over and far too deep to fall into. It shut him off completely from the peak that rose in its center.
“Jack Frost will be able to make an ice bridge across it when he comes,” said Billy, so he patiently sat down to wait.
In another instant he cried out in alarm.
Overhead sounded a crackling and snapping, and swiftly the Equator dropped down from a great height and began to hover directly over the head of the Evening Star.
Already the ice under her had begun to melt. Soon it would melt away altogether and then Billy knew that the Equator, kept at a distance now by fear of the cold snow, would fall upon her and bear her away, and perhaps turn her into a Comet right before his horrified eyes.