Wayne had almost fallen asleep, when he was aroused by a muffled chuckle from the direction of Don’s bed.
“What’s up?” he asked sleepily.
“Nothing,” was the response. “I just remembered that I put the walnut shells in Dave’s boots.”
When Wayne told Don that he could skate, he had not been quite truthful.
“He asked me, ‘Can you skate?’” reasoned Wayne; “not ‘Do you skate?’ And of course I can if I try hard enough!”
But the argument didn’t quite satisfy him, and he set out to lend veracity to it by purchasing a pair of half-clamp skates in the village and seeking an unfrequented pond fully a mile from the school. About Wayne’s home in Virginia skates were seldom seen and more seldom used. But the boy had been ashamed to acknowledge his ignorance before the others who did so many things well. He had been about to qualify his assent by adding that he could not skate very well when Don interrupted him.
To learn to skate without instruction is almost as difficult as to learn to swim unaided, and Wayne’s troubles began on the first afternoon that he eluded his friends and sneaked off through the village. The pond was hidden from the road by willows, and he had little fear of interruption. After a struggle of several moments he at last managed to affix his skates—he put the left one on the right shoe, and vice versa—and stepped on to the ice. The immediate result was as surprising as it was disappointing, for his first step resulted not in progress but in prostration, his head coming in violent contact with the frozen earth at the margin of the ice. He arose with a thumping headache, and after a moment of painful bewilderment turned his steps homeward, with a vastly increased respect for the art of skating and a heightened dislike for it as the result of his first lesson.
But he was back again the next day. He found a friendly branch leaning out over the ice, and with its aid experimented on his runners, making numerous remarkable discoveries in the next ten minutes. He found that it was necessary to place the rear foot at an angle while he advanced the front one, and that as long as the center of gravity of his body remained in advance of one foot he was in little danger of falling. But as soon as the branch was discarded he sat down just where the ice was hardest, and it took him a whole minute of the most careful management to get his feet under him again; and when that was accomplished he discovered to his dismay that he was sliding, as though propelled by invisible force, toward the very middle of the pond, his skates gradually parting company and his body held as though in the act of sitting. The thing was so disconcerting that he was heartily glad when he did take a seat, even though it was at a disheartening distance from shore. He first considered crawling back to terra firma on his hands and knees, but that would seem too much like giving up; so he again went through the remarkable contortions necessary to recover his equilibrium, and finally reached the shore after a series of exciting adventures, during which one skate became detached at the toe and his breath forsook him entirely. Four more falls completed that day’s lesson, and he went back to the school with his head buzzing like a hive of bees and his body covered with bruises.