ad been safely landed
across the lake.

But on the evening of the third day Parker was more seriously alarmed
by the weather-frowns than he had been by the threats of Gideon Ward
himself.

The postmaster presaged it, sniffing into the dusk with upturned nose
and wagging his head ominously.

"I reckon old Gid has got one more privilege of these north woods into
his clutch and is now handlin' the weather for the section," he said.
"For if we ain't goin' to have a spell of the soft and moist that will
put you out of business for a while, then I miss my guess."

It began with a fog and ended in a driving rainstorm that converted the
surface of the lake into an expanse of slush that there was no dealing
with.

Parker's experience had been with climatic conditions in lower latitudes
and in his alarm he believed that spring had come swooping in on him and
that the storm meant the breaking up of the ice or at least would weaken
it so that it would not bear his engine.

But the postmaster, who could be a comforter as well as a prophet of
ill, took him into the little enclosure of his inner office and showed
him a long list of records pencilled on the slide of his wicket.

"Ice was never known to break up in Spinnaker earlier than the first
week in May," said Dodge, "and this rain-spitting won't open so much as
a riffle. You just keep cool and wait."

At the end of the rain-storm the weather helped Parker to keep cool. He
heard the wind roaring from the northwest in the night. The frame of the
little tavern shuddered. Ice fragments, torn from eaves and gables, went
spinning away into the darkness over the frozen crust with the sound of
the bells of fairy sleighs.

When Parker, fully awakening in the early dawn, looked out upon the
frosty air, his breath was as visibly voluminous as the puff from an
escape-valve of the "Swogon." With his finger-nail he scratched the
winter enameling from his window-pane, and through that peep-hole gazed
out upon the lake. The frozen expanse stretched steel-white, glary and
glistening, a solid sheet of ice.

"There's a surface," cried Parker, in joyous soliloquy, "that will
enable the Swogon to haul as much as a P. K. & R. mogul! Jack Frost is
certainly a great engineer."

He at once put a crew at work getting out more saplings for sleds. In
two more trips, with his extra "cars" and with that glassy surface, he
believed that every ounce of railroad material could be "yarded" at the
P