But Johnny was up before the sun the next morning, and where the cross-piece of his frame rested on the longer board, in the very centre, he bored a hole for his mast—bored a lot of little holes close together, and worked them out with his jack-knife till he had one big hole. On either side of that he nailed a small block, and on the top of those he nailed a bit of board that just fitted the space, and then in the middle of that bit of board he made another hole just over the hole already bored, and there was a step for his mast, and his mast itself was ready in the shape of a good stout bean-pole that he had.
Very well pleased with himself so far, Mr. Johnny hurried through breakfast, and got out of the way before his grandmother could ask him to find her glasses, or his mother could suggest a few pages of history. His conscience was not easy, but then he would look for the glasses all a fore-noon another day, and learn a great many pages of history in the afternoon; and they really should consider, he thought, that one learns something in building an ice-boat; and if his heart smote him about the dear baby who cried for Johnny to play with him, the baby would cry at the other side of his mouth when he made a voyage in Johnny's ice-boat. So he took two of the old skates now, screwed the heel-screw of each into a bit of wood a foot long and three inches wide, and, working holes for the leathers, strapped the skates firmly, each to its own piece of wood, and then nailed the pieces securely under each end of the cross-piece, the skates there pointing forwards.
For the rudder then he took the third skate, screwed and strapped to a bit of wood as before, and nailed and screwed that bit of wood to the club end of a long round stick which he brought up through a hole already bored in the stern end of the main beam, or first long board; and he fitted this round stick to a handle by running it through a hole in something he had whittled out like the clothes-paddle or boiler-stick of washing-day.
"I've done well by the day, and the day's done well by me," said Johnny. "But now come needle and thread. I don't believe," said he, "that Aunt Mame is as hard-hearted as the rest." And by dint of hanging over the back of her chair with a good many judicious hugs and kisses—the little rogue really loved his aunt Mamy when there was nothing to gain by it—he induced her to coax a coarse and stout kitchen-table cloth from his mother's linen stores, to bind it with some strong tape, and then to cross the tape from corner to corner in order to strengthen it still more. When he had lashed his sail to his bean-pole with a stout twine, and made a gasket to hold his gaff, which was part of his bamboo fishing-rod, Johnny stopped to execute a brief war-dance, to hug his aunt again, to put on his reefer, and to stow away some mince patties. Then, securing the rope at the other corner of his sail, he dragged his tiny ice-boat free of the big blocks of ice along the shore, established himself upon the seat with his heels against the cross-piece, and waited for the wind.
It came along, with a little dust of snow upon its wings. It took Johnny's sail as if it were a puff of thistle-down; the rope slipped out through Johnny's fingers quick enough to burn them. His heart gave a great plunge, but he held fast, and the next moment a creak, a twist, a hiss, and he was moving. Moving? No—flying! Flying through the air even while he knew he was cutting with a sharp hiss into the ice—the razor-edge of the wind cutting with a sharp hiss, too, upon his cheek, and taking his breath away at first. And there he was speeding up the river so fast that his mother screamed and ran into the house, and his grandmother, looking from the window, began to blame every one else for letting him start out on such a hair-breadth undertaking, and his aunt Mamy declared it was like a great white bubble blowing up the sky, a great white spirit flashing up the river, and if he never came back she was glad to see the last of him that way—but he would be back all right. And so he was.
They said that little ice-boat went at the rate of forty miles an hour. Johnny always insists that it is eighty. But all I know about it is that the March maple-camp was twenty miles up river, and Johnny brought home a great parcel of the sweetest and richest morsels that the sunshine ever coaxed out of the earth through a maple-stem, that very sunset as he ran his ice-boat, "The Scarer," up the shore, and promised his mother he would never go half as fast as he could go in her, unless he had a mask to save his face from blistering, and his father was aboard.