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 the village in which the girl had been living for eight months. Colonel Van Dyne, owner of one of the canning factories, had a fine home on the heights overlooking the lake. It was with the colonel's gardener and superintendent that Nelson Haley had an acquaintance, and through that acquaintanceship had obtained the cut flowers from the colonel's greenhouse. When the three had hurried up the half-cleared landing to the railroad station, Janice fairly staggering between her two companions, the office was closed and nobody was about the railroad premises. It was a holiday, and no more trains were expected at the Landing until night. Janice all but broke down at this added bad turn of affairs. To come all this distance only to be balked! "It's jest blamed _mean_!" sputtered Marty. "Telegraph shops ain't got no right to shut up--in the daytime, too." "It's not a Western Union wire," explained Nelson. "The railroad only takes ordinary messages as a matter of convenience. But wait! That door's open and there's a fire in the waiting-room, you see. Just because this card says the agent and operator won't be here till five o'clock doesn't mean that he's gone out of town. Besides, I'll see my friend, Jim Watrous." This was the gardener and general factotum at Colonel Van Dyne's. The Poketown school-teacher hurried away, and left Janice and Marty sitting together in the railroad station.