Coming out of this with glowing face and heaving chest, she threw on her dressing-gown and leaped out of the cabin and into the moonlight which flooded a narrow open spot on deck.
Away at the left she saw the ice on the lake shore stand out in irregular piles. Here was a huge pile twenty feet high and there a single cake on end. There was a whole forest of jagged, bayonet-like edges and here again pile after pile lay scattered like shocks of grain in the field.
“For all the world like the Arctic!” she breathed. “What sport it would be to play hide-and-go-seek with oneself out there in the moonlight.”
She paused a moment in thought. Then, clapping her hands she exclaimed, “I’ll do it. It will be like going back to good old Cape Prince of Wales, in Alaska.” Hastening inside, she twisted her hair in a knot on the top of her head, drew on some warm garments, crowned herself with a stocking-cap, and was away toward the beach.
Since the O Moo was on the track nearest to the shore, she was but a moment reaching the edge of the ice which, packed thick between two breakwaters, lay glistening away in the moonlight. Here she hesitated. She was not sure it was quite safe. The wind had been blowing on shore for days. It had brought the ice-packs in. Under similar conditions in the Arctic, the ice would have been solidly frozen together by this time, but she was not acquainted with lake ice; it might be treacherous.
“Pooh!” she exclaimed at last. “Wind’s still onshore; I’ll try it.”
Stepping out upon the first flat cake, she hurried across it to dodge into the shadow of a towering pile of broken fragments.
“Catch me!” she exclaimed joyously aloud. “Catch me if you can!”
She had reverted to the days of her childhood and was playing hide-and-go-seek with herself. First behind this pile, then that, she flitted in the moonlight like a ghost. On and on, in a zigzag course, she went until a glance back brought from her lips an exclamation of surprise: “How far I am from the shore!” For a moment she stood quite still. Then the startled exclamation came again.
“That cake of ice tips. It moves! I must go back.”