ck, but he had been assisted in
the labor by Billy Coburg, his chosen friend and ally in all
emergencies. Billy was as good as gold, a fat fellow with yellow hair
and a red face, full of ingenious devices, stanch in his friendship, and
as fond of fun as of eating, in which last field he was eminently great.
In the possession of some one of the boys was a thick, old-fashioned
novel of the yellow-covered type, entitled, "Rinard, the Red Revenger,"
and Billy had followed the record of the murderous pirate chieftain with
the greatest gusto, and had insisted upon bestowing his title upon the
jumper. So it came that the Red Revenger was the pride and comfort of
the school, and Jack Burrows, as he looked up from his algebra and out
the window at it in the frost-fringed morning hour, rather congratulated
himself upon its general style. They'd had a lot of fun with it. His
eyes wandered to the ice-covered flats and the narrow roadway stretching
white across them. What a time they had yesterday keeping the jumper on
the track, and what a shrewd device they had for steering! A hole had
been bored down through the heel of each thick runner, and on each aft
corner of the jumper had a boy been stationed armed with a sharpened
hickory stick. To swerve the jumper to the left, the boy on the right
but pressed his stick down through the hole beneath him, and the sharp
point scraping along the ice-covered ground, must slow the jumper as
desired. And so, on the other side, when the jumper threatened to go
off the roadway to the left, the boy on that side acted. It was a great
invention and a necessary one. What would happen if that jumper, loaded
with boys and girls, should leave the track just now? Jack chuckled as
he thought of it. With its broad, sustaining runners, and with impetus
once gained by its sheer descent, for what a distance must it speed upon
that India-rubber ice before it finally broke through! What a happening
then! The moderately bad boy's countenance was radiant as the
contemplation of this catastrophe came upon him with its rounded force.
He turned his face, and his gaze fell upon the trim figure of Jennie
Orton on the other side of the room. How things go. There was an instant
association of ideas between girl and jumper. The young fellow's face
became first bright, and then most shrewdly thoughtful. School was
dismissed for the noon hour. And then, after the lunches had been eaten,
Jack Burrows went outside with Billy