there."

"Show me," demanded Neale. "If there _is_ a trap there----"

"Oh, Neale!" Agnes cried again. "Don't!"

"Don't you be a little goose, Aggie," said the earnest boy. "Come on,
Clarry."

"Oh, I don't want to," said the other boy, seeing that Neale was in
earnest now. "We'll get burned."

Neale grabbed his hand and whirled him around, and they shot in toward
the burning wharf, whether Clarence would or no!

"Hey, boys, keep away from there!" shouted a man from the next dock.
"You'll get burned."

"Oh, Neale, come back!" wailed Agnes.

"You hear, Neale O'Neil?" gasped Clarence, struggling in the bigger
boy's grasp. "_I don't want to go!_"

"Show me where the trap is," said the boy who had been brought up in a
circus. "Then you can run if you like. I'm not afraid."

"I am!" squealed Clarence Bimberg.

But he was forced by the stronger Neale to skate under the burning
wharf. They bumped about for half a minute among the piles and the
broken ice. They could hear the flames crackling overhead, and the smoke
puffed in between the planks. The black ice was solid and there was
light enough to see fairly well.

"There! There!" shrieked the frightened Clarence. "You can see it now,
Neale! Let me go!"

It did not look like a trap-door to Neale. Yet some short, rotting steps
led up out of the frozen water to the flooring of the old wharf. The
moment he essayed to climb these steps on his skates, Clarence broke
away and shot out from under the burning dock.

Neale was too determined to reach the interior of Seneca Sprague's shack
to save the old prophet's books, to bother about the defection of his
schoolmate. If Joe Eldred had only been at hand, _he_ would have stood
by!

"Oh, Neale! can you open it?" quavered a voice behind and below him.

Neale almost tumbled backward from the steps, he was so amazed. He
looked down to see Agnes' rosy, troubled face turned up to his gaze.

"For pity's sake! get out of here, Aggie," he begged.

"I won't!" she returned, tartly.

"You'll get burned."

"So will you."

"But aren't you afraid?" the boy demanded, in growing wonder.

"Of course I am!" she gasped. "But I can stand it if _you_ can."

"Oh, _me_!"

"Hurry up!" cried Agnes. "I can help carry out some of the books."

Meanwhile Neale had been pounding on the boards overhead. Suddenly two
of them lifted a little.

"I've got it!" yelled Neale, in delight, and above the crackling of the
flames and the confus