guish what Nelson Haley shouted at her, and he
was so near, too. He pointed ahead. She stooped to look under the
boom and saw a great windrow of snow--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 factori