"Well, come on, if you're going to explore," said Nelson Baker. "What are you staring at, Sunny Boy?" "Ice," said Sunny Boy, pointing up the stream. "Isn't that ice all over everything?" The boys looked. A little distance away the ground seemed to be covered with cakes of ice. "Hurry up!" shouted Perry. "It's an ice field. We can have heaps of fun playing." The others hurried after Perry, and when they came to the field where the ice was they found that the brook was almost a river at this point. It had cut a wide, new gash in the bank and had overflowed, leaving mud and water and ice in great quantities and cutting the trunks of little trees that stood in the way. The boys scrambled up on the ice and pretended that they were at the North Pole. "I'll be the savage Eskimo and chase you white men," said Carleton. "Are Eskimos savage?" asked Sunny Boy doubtfully. "They don't look savage in the geography book. They look fat." "Of course they are savage," said Carleton. "Anybody who lives at the North Pole is savage. Now when I chase you, you have to jump." Carleton made an awful face, such as he thought a savage Eskimo would make, and ran directly toward Sunny Boy, who jumped from his cake of ice to the ground. But instead of landing on the ground, he landed in water! Ice-cold water and up to his knees! And at that moment the ice on which Carleton stood began to rock. "The brook!" gasped Sunny Boy. "It's running over again! It's inside my rubber boots!" The boys jumped from the ice cakes on which they stood, and those who had only rubbers on were wet at once to the knees. "We'll be drowned!" cried Perry Phelps. Sunny Boy saw a barn in the next field, and he thought if they could only reach that they would be safe. "We'll all take hold of hands," he said quickly. "And don't anybody let go. There's a barn up there, and we can go and stay in that. Bob will come and find us, I know he will." The water kept rising higher and higher, and it was hard work to walk against the current. Once Sunny Boy stumbled and fell, and once Carleton lost his balance; but the others pulled them up again. When they reached the barn they found it was an old building, built very close to the brook and quite empty. "It must have been the hay barn," said Sunny Boy, who remembered what he had learned when he visited Grandpa Horton's farm. "Sometimes hay barns are built out in the fields so it won't be so far to haul the hay. I wonder how far off the house is?" The house had burned down years ago, but Sunny Boy did not know that. The boys were only too thankful to have a dry floor to stand on, and they huddled in one corner out of the keen March wind that blew in through the windows, for every pane of glass in the barn was broken. Every few minutes they could hear the crash of a chunk of ice against the building, and once or twice Sunny Boy thought he felt something move. The third time he saw Jimmie Butterworth looking at him.