For a glorious hour the girls and boys enjoyed what was to them the best
sledding of their lives. They coasted down the hill and dragged their
sleds up again, shouting and calling to each other while their cheeks
and, it must be admitted, sometimes their noses, too, glowed with the
sting of the sharp wind and they had to stamp hard on the frozen ground
to keep their toes from freezing.
"The best sport ever!" cried Paul.
"All to the merry," came from Chet. "What do you say, girls?" and he
turned to Billie and her classmates.
What did they say? All shouted at once that such fine sport couldn't
possibly be beaten.
"Can't be beat!" sang out Chet gaily. "Just like old Ma Jackson's rag
carpet."
"Ma Jackson's rag carpet? What do you mean?" asked Laura.
"She couldn't beat it for fear it would fall apart," was the sly reply.
And then the merry lad had to dodge a hard chunk of snow Laura threw at
him.
"Burr-r! isn't it cold?" cried Billie, taking a mitten from one of her
hands and blowing on her numbed fingers. "I'd never know what it was to
feel cold if it weren't for my fingers and toes. Teddy! Stop your
pushing! What do you want now?"
For Teddy had seized her by the shoulders and had sat her firmly down
upon his big bobsled.
"You've let Paul Martinson take you down three times to my once," he
accused her, while he settled himself comfortably behind her on the
sled. "And now it's my turn. Hey, look out there, you fellows--we're
off!"
And before the astonished Billie could do more than utter a giggling
protest, they were indeed "off," flying down the ice-glazed hill at a
rate that took her breath away.
"Some speed, eh?" chortled Teddy in her ear. "This old boat of mine has
got 'em all beat. I bet we could race them all to a standstill."
"Why don't we try?" Billie yelled back at him. "It would be lots of fun.
Oh, Teddy, look out!" she shrieked, for they had reached the foot of the
hill and Teddy had skimmed so close to the trunk of a tree that Billie
afterward declared they had scraped off a piece of bark.
"Don't worry," Teddy said, reassuringly. "Nothing's going to happen to
you when you're with your uncle Ted."
At which remark Billie could not help giggling to herself. "Boys did
think they were so awfully much!" Then suddenly she cried out:
"Teddy, that's the wrong path! We have never been down it before."
"That's why I'm trying it," said Teddy recklessly, as he swung down the
strange path that ran at right angles to the one they were on. "The
ground slopes, too, so we ought to have some more fun."
Billie said nothing. She would not for the life of her have Teddy guess
that she was afraid. They had never been down that path before, because
never before had a sled had momentum enough to carry it that far.
And the ground was sloping more and more and the sled was going faster
and faster with each second. The path was by no means straight, either,
and if Teddy had not been pretty good at keeping his head they would
most surely have run into something and have had a nasty spill.
"Oh, Teddy, can't we stop?" asked Billie at last, unable to keep her
fright all to herself. "We don't know where this leads to. Can't you
stop, Teddy?"
"Not very well," answered the boy uneasily. "We will surely run on to
level ground in a minute. Don't worry."
But even as he spoke he jerked the sled around a sudden turn in the path
and they came, apparently, to the end of the world. With a nasty little
scraping sound the sled dived off into nothingness!
It all happened so suddenly that Billie did not have even time enough to
scream. She had a sickening feeling of falling through space, and then
she struck something--something that yielded, luckily, under her weight,
and she sank, down, down, down, coming to rest at last in a world where
everything was white and slippery and cold--oh, _so_ cold.
She must have lost consciousness for a minute, for when she came to
herself again in this strange new world she heard somebody calling her
name wildly and a moment later Santa Claus poked his head over a
snowbank and peered down at her.
At least, she thought at first it was Santa Claus, because his face was
so very red and the snow was clinging to his fuzzy cap in such a funny
manner.
But in a moment more she realized her mistake, for the red face and the
funny hat disappeared and in their place were shoved two legs that she
was very sure belonged to Teddy. And in a moment more Teddy himself slid
down beside her.
"Hello," she greeted him with a smile. "I thought you were Santa Claus.
Why weren't you?"
Teddy stared at her for a minute, anxiously.
"I say," he cried, taking one of her hands and rubbing it gently. "I
guess that loop the loop of ours knocked you silly."
"I'm always silly," was Billie's amazing reply, as she sat up and began
feeling herself all over carefully. "But it certainly did knock me!"
"Are you all right?" demanded Teddy, watching her as she stretched out
first one leg and then the other. "You didn't break anything, did you?"
"Nothing but my dignity," she answered, with a giggle that brought an
answering grin from the boy. "Teddy," she demanded, turning to him
suddenly, "what did happen, anyway?"
"I'm sure I don't know, except that we came to the end of that path and
jumped off," answered Teddy, feeling gingerly of his forehead on which
Billie could see that a large purple lump was beginning to swell. "If I
had had a chance to see what was coming I could have rolled off the sled
and pulled you with me. But that turn in the road brought us right on
top of it. It's a sort of precipice, I guess," he went on to explain,
while Billie eyed with sympathy the swelling lump on his forehead. "It's
about fifteen feet high, I think, and if there hadn't been snow on the
ground we surely would have got hurt."
"If there hadn't been snow on the ground, we wouldn't have been
sledding," Billie pointed out, adding, so unexpectedly as to make Teddy
jump: "Who hit you?"
"Wh--what?" he gasped. Then seeing that her eyes were fixed on the bump
that he was still fingering gingerly, Teddy's face grew redder than it
already was, if such a thing were possible, and his hand fell quickly to
his side. "Oh, that!" he said, loftily, as if it were nothing at all. "I
guess the runner of the sled gave me a whack just as we dumped over. It
doesn't hurt, though. Not a bit."
"I bet it does, too," said Billie, as the boy pulled his cap down tight
over the tell-tale spot. "Where is the sled, Teddy?" she added.
"Out there, somewhere, sticking in a drift," answered the boy. "I didn't
have time to pull it out because I thought you had been killed or
something and I had to come to look for you."
"Thanks," she laughed at him. Then her face became suddenly serious, and
she struggled to her feet, trying to brush off the snow that seemed to
cover her from head to foot. "How are we going to get out of this,
Teddy?" she asked, looking at him seriously.
"Ask me an easy one," he returned, his good-looking face extremely
anxious and puzzled. "The snow is awfully deep, and I don't believe we
could ever get up to that path again. It would take us a couple of hours
to go around, and besides, I'm not sure just how to go."
"In other words," said Billie, trying her best to speak gayly while her
heart sank at this unusually long speech of Teddy's, "we're lost, aren't
we?"
"I guess it amounts to that," Teddy answered soberly, and for a long
minute they just stood staring at each other.
Then Billie gave herself an impatient little shake.
"Help me out of this," she said, as she tried to push through the heavy
snow that seemed to press in upon her from every side. "I'd like to have
a look around, anyway."
She found that even with Teddy's help it was no easy task to clamber out
of the snowdrift that she had fallen into, and both she and the boy were
panting with exertion when they had finally managed to get out into the
open.
Even there they stood up to their waists in the clinging snow, and
Billie, looking desolately out over the white expanse, began to realize
that she was very, very cold.
"There's the sled," said Teddy, pointing to two runners sticking out of
the snow and marking the spot where the sled had struck. "Wait here and
I'll get it."
Billie watched him as he struggled through the drifts, and suddenly she
was aware of an overwhelming desire to sit down where she was and cry.
"But that wouldn't do any good," she told herself sharply, "even if this
place does look more lonely than a desert. If we don't get where it's
warm pretty soon we'll turn into icicles ourselves, I guess."
The wind had become stronger and more biting, and Billie's teeth had
begun to chatter. She was glad when Teddy floundered back to her, the
rope of his sled looped over one arm. He slipped the other arm through
hers protectingly.
"We'll find a way out of this soon," he said, comfortingly. "You just
watch your uncle Teddy."
Billie tried to laugh but she could not, her teeth were chattering so.
"You said that before," she told him hysterically. "And we--we--went
over the cliff!"