had by this
time been disposed of, he roared a few sharp orders, and his willing
crew set at work. Men with axes chopped holes a few feet apart in a
circle about the engine. There were many choppers, and although the ice
was three feet thick, the water soon came bubbling through. As soon as
a hole was cut, other men stuck down their huge cross-cuts and began to
saw the ice.

All too soon Parker, craning his neck where he lay on the ice-boat,
heard an ominous buckling and crackling of ice, and saw his faithful
Swogon disappear below the surface of the lake, her mighty splash
sending the water gushing like a silvery geyser into the moonlight. The
attached sleds, loaded with the rails and spikes and other material,
followed like a line of huge, frightened beavers seeking their hole.

"There," ejaculated Connick, wiping the sweat from his brow, "when that
hole freezes up the Poquette Carry Railro'd will be canned for a time,
anyway. Now three cheers for Colonel Gid Ward!"

The cheers were howled vociferously.

He pointed to the men of the settlement, who were now joined by their
wives and children, and were watching operations from the bank.

"Three cheers for the brave men and the sweet ladies o' Sunkhaze!"

Loud laughter followed these cheers. The people on the shore remained
discreetly silent.

"Three groans for the Poquette Railro'd!"

The hoarse cries rang out on the crisp night wind, and at the close one
of those queer, splitting, wide-reaching, booming crackles, heard in the
winter on big waters, spread across the lake from shore to shore.

"Even the old lake's with us!" a woodsman shouted.

Connick and his men had finished what they had come to Sunkhaze to do.
They climbed aboard the huge ice-craft. The sheet was paid off, and with
dragging peavey-sticks instead of centerboard to hold the contrivance
into the wind, the boat moved away on its tack across the lake.

"Say good-by to your friend here!" Connick bellowed. "He says he thinks
he'll go with us, strange country for to see."

"Tell inquirin' admirers that his address in futur' will be north pole,
shady side," another rough humorist added.

The men on the shore did not reply. They understood perfectly the
uncertain temper of "larking" woodsmen. There had been cases in times
past when a taunting word had turned rude jollity into sour hankering
for revenge.

The bottle began to go about on the sleds, and the refrain of a
lumberman's chorus, with