The Rival Campers Ashore; or, The Mystery of the Mill

by Ruel Perley Smith

The mill passed out of mind, however, for some time, when there fell still another great snow on the following day, heavier than the preceding storm. It piled drift upon drift, and made the roads about Benton, for miles in every direction, impassible. It shut each farmhouse in upon itself; the Ellisons in their home; Colonel Witham and Granny Thornton alone in the Half Way House. The old mill was silent for a whole week.

Then there came a magazine to Tom Harris, bringing a timely suggestion to the boys of Benton. It told of the snowshoe of the Norwegians, the ski, with which a runner could travel through the deep drifts of loose snow, and coast down the steep hills, as easily as on a toboggan. Soon, working in spare hours, each youth had fashioned himself a pair. They got the long, thin strips of hard wood, steamed the ends and curled them like sled runners, sand-papered and polished them, and put on the straps of leather to hold the toe.

They learned how to go through the drifts with these, sliding the shoe along through the loose snow, instead of lifting the foot, as with the Canadian snowshoe. They got each a long pole, to steady one's self with, and practised sliding down the terraces of Tom Harris's garden, standing erect and doing their best to keep on their feet.

When they had had their preliminary tumbles, and were proficient in the sport, they started off one day and went along up stream; tried the steep banks that led down on to that, and found it more exciting than tobogganning.

Tim Reardon used his skis to get up above the dams, where the spring-holes in the stream were. And, through the Christmas holidays, he made his headquarters at the cabin that belonged to the canoeists, which he kept hot by a rousing fire. Day after day, he set out from there, skiing his way up stream, dragging after him a toboggan on which was loaded a pail half filled with water. In this swam his live bait, winnows that he had caught through the ice in the brook. Also he carried an axe, a borrowed ice chisel, some lines and other stuff.

One might have seen him there, through the afternoons, watching sharply the five lines that he tended, and varying the monotony of waiting by an occasional ski slide down the neighbouring bank.

He had five holes chopped through the ice, and a line set in each, baited with a live minnow. This line was attached to a strong, limber switch of birch, set up slant-wise over the hole, with the butt stuck fast in a hole chopped in the ice and banked with snow. And this switch flew a little streamer of coloured calico; so that Tim had only to see the streamer bobbing up and down, at any distance, to know that there was a pickerel fast on the hook.

He had famous sport there for ten days or more, for the fish were hungry, and bigger ones came to the bait than in summer. Every third day he went back in to Benton with his catch, which he had kept packed in snow, sold them at the market, and was fairly rolling in wealth; and when, one afternoon, he hooked and landed an eight-pound fish, and travelled to town with it, and saw it set up in the market, with a sign on it to the effect that it had been caught by Timothy Reardon of Benton, he was the proudest boy to be found anywhere.

Then, just following Christmas, there was a glorious dinner up at the Ellison farm for Henry Burns and his friends, in honour of Little Bess. Tim got an invitation to that, too, through his loyal friends, Henry Burns and Jack Harvey; and he and Joe Warren ate more than any four others, and Young Joe, who had absconded with the most of a huge mince pie, left over from the dinner, was found afterward groaning on the kitchen sofa, and had to be dosed with ginger and peppermint, so that he could partake of cornballs and maple candy later on.

And there was Bess Ellison—Bess Thornton no longer—looking remarkably pretty and uncommonly mischievous, dressed no more in dingy gingham, but in the best Mrs. Ellison could buy and make up for her; and she held out her hand to Henry Burns and took him in to Mrs. Ellison, who said something to him that made him come very near blushing, and nearly lose his customary self-control.