As she glanced down at the spot, another strange circumstance surprised her. “What makes that spot look so much bluer than the other ice?” she asked herself.
As she examined it more closely she saw that this patch of blue had a very definite outline, but rough and jagged, like the edges of a piece of cloth haggled by a child who is just learning to use a pair of scissors.
Having recaptured her fugitive skate, she clamped it to her foot and was about to go on her way when another startling fact arrested her.
“Why, that,” she thought, “is just about where that man was sitting last night; the one Marian and I saw who had apparently dropped in from nowhere.”
So struck with the discovery was she that she skated over to the edge of the ice where the sled drawn by the two strangers had left the snow. There she took good notice of the direction in which the sled had been going when it came upon the ice.
Turning about, she skated backward with her eyes on the track made by the sled runners. She was endeavoring to retrace the sled over the ice where no tracks were visible, in an effort to prove that the sled had arrived at the point on the ice where the hole had been cut when it turned and struck off at another angle.
So successful was she in this that she all but fell over the rise in the ice a second time.
“That’s that,” she murmured. “Now for something else.”
Skating rapidly to the end of the lagoon nearest the dry dock she circulated about until she discovered the spot at which the sled had left the ice.
Again guiding herself by the course taken by the sled, she skated backward and in a short time found herself once more beside the spot in the ice where the hole had been cut.