--a huge drift more than six feet
high--not half a mile away.

This drift stretched, it seemed, from side to side of the lake. They
could not see what lay beyond it. Janice expected the others would drop
the sail and bring the ice boat to a halt. Some roughness in the ice, or
perhaps a narrow opening, had caught the first driven flakes of snow
here the night before. The snow had gathered rapidly when once a streak
of it lay across the lake. Deeper and deeper the drift had grown until
tons of the white crystals had been heaped here in what looked to Janice
to be an impassable barrier.

"Oh! Oh!" she shrieked. "Won't you stop?"

Nelson Haley smiled grimly and shook his head. Marty uttered a shriek of
exultation as the ice boat bore down upon the drift. _He_ was quite
speed-mad.

"Hang on! hang on!" commanded Nelson Haley.

Another moment and the frightened Janice saw the bow of the boat
rise--as it seemed--straight into the air. Amid the groaning of timbers
and the shrieking of the wind, the _Fly-by-Night_ shot up the steep
slant of the drift and over its crest!

The cry Janice tried to utter was frozen in her throat. She saw the ice
ahead and below them. Like a great bird--or a huge batfish leaping from
the sea--the ice boat shot out on a long curve from the summit of the
hard-packed snowdrift.

The shock of its return to the ice was terrific. Janice felt sure the
boat must be racked to bits.

But the _Fly-by-Night_ was strongly built. With the momentum secured by
its leap from the drift, it skated over the ice for a mile or more, with
scarcely a thimbleful of wind in its sail, yet traveling like a fast
express.

Then it answered the helm again, the wind filled the sail, and they bore
down upon the Landing on a direct tack.

"Gee! Ain't it great?" cried Marty, as Nelson Haley signaled him to drop
the sail. "Don't that beat any traveling you ever done, Janice?"

Janice faintly admitted that it did; but neither the boy nor Nelson
Haley realized what a trial the trip had been to the girl. Janice was
too proud to show the fear she felt; but she could scarcely stand when
the _Fly-by-Night_ finally stopped with its nose to the shore, just
beyond the steamboat dock.

Popham Landing was scarcely larger than Poketown; only there were
canning factories here, and the terminus of the narrow-gauge railroad on
which Janice had finished her rail journey from Greensboro the spring
before. So it was a livelier place than