Frank Warner - Bobby Blake on a Plantation - or, Lost in the Great Swamp

The boys looked embarrassed.

“How is Lee Cartier getting along, Dr. Raymond?” asked Bobby eagerly, glad to change the subject. “Mr. Carrier told me that he wasn’t well enough for us to see him.”

The doctor’s face took on a worried look.

“It’s a little early to tell yet,” be replied. “Dr. Evans, who has just gone, told me that the drenching he had received and the exposure afterward while you were getting back to shore had been a severe shock to his system. He comes from the South, you know, and hasn’t been up here long enough to get hardened to our climate. There is a possibility that he may be in for a serious illness. Still, we’ll hope for the best. I won’t keep you any longer,” he said, rising as a signal of dismissal, “but I want once more to say to you that you have done honor to yourselves and the school.”

The boys bowed themselves out and closed the door behind them.

“The doctor’s a brick, isn’t he?” remarked Fred, as they went down the hall.

“You bet he is,” agreed Sparrow. “He’s the real goods.”

“He’s all wool and a yard wide,” was Bobby’s tribute to the head of Rockledge School.

A week passed swiftly by and then another, and by that time Winter had come in earnest. There had as yet been no snow, but the weather had become intensely cold and the lake was beginning to freeze over. At first, the ice looked like a gigantic spider’s web shooting out in shimmering threads until the entire surface was covered with a crystal coating. Then the ice began to thicken at the shores, and it was evident that with the continuance of the cold weather it would soon be possible to skate from one end of the lake to the other.

Skates were gotten out and polished and sharpened. Some of the boys busied themselves with making ice sails, which they could hold in their hands and which would carry them like the wind along the glassy surface without the expenditure of any effort of their own, save what was required to hold the sails. This contrivance had a special appeal to Pee Wee, who was a profound believer in any device that would save labor. He was far too lazy however to make one for himself and had written home asking his folks to buy and send him one. To the other boys’ suggestion that it be especially reinforced or made of sheet iron, he turned a deaf and scornful ear.

But before the ice was quite hard enough to be trusted, the snow took a hand. Up to then there had been nothing but a few flurries that did scarcely more than whiten the ground. But one afternoon, as the boys came out of their last recitations, they saw that the skies were lowering and that a steady snowstorm was in progress.

Ordinarily this would have been welcomed, but just now the boys had their minds set on skating, so that the sight of the whirling flakes was something of a disappointment.

“There goes our skating up the flue,” commented Shiner, as he looked on the ground on which there was already an inch of snow. “The lake will be no good, if it’s all covered with snow.”

“And by the time the snow’s ready to melt, the ice will melt too,” mourned Sparrow.

“And I just got a notice from the express company this morning that my ice sail was there,” complained Pee Wee.

“Oh, stop your grouching, you poor fish,” said Bobby. “In the first place the snow may not amount to anything. In the second place, if it does, we can get busy and sweep off enough of the ice on the lake to skate on. And in the third place, what we may miss in skating we can make up in coasting.”

chanted Skeets. “I guess that means Bobby,” he added, giving the latter a nudge in the ribs.

“Well, what have we got to growl about anyway?” said Fred, falling into his chum’s mood. “Here we are well and strong and able to put away three square meals a day” – here Pee Wee pricked up his ears. “Now if we were shut up in a room like Lee Cartier, we might have something to kick about.”

“Poor Lee!” remarked Bobby regretfully. “He’s certainly had a rough deal. He’s lucky of course that he didn’t get pneumonia. But it’s no joke to be kept in his room so long. I’m going over to see him for a while as soon as supper is over.”

Which he did, accompanied by Fred and Sparrow, who had expressed a desire to go along.

The other schoolboys found Lee in the private room that had been set apart for him, propped up with pillows in a big easy chair and wrapped snugly in a bathrobe. His face was pale from his illness, but it lighted up when he saw his visitors.

“I was just wishing you fellows would drop in,” he said, as they shook hands with him and pulled their chairs up close.

“It must get awful poky cooped up in the room so long,” said Bobby sympathetically.

“It sure does,” rejoined the boy from the South. “Of course I have books to read that help to pass away the time, but that isn’t like being with the fellows. Not that I’ve read very much this afternoon,” he went on, “because I’ve been too busy looking at the snow. Do you know that this is the first real snow storm I have ever seen?”

“Is that so?” queried Fred in astonishment. “We see so much of it every year that it gets to be an old story with us.”

“You’ve got an awful lot of fun coming to you,” put in Sparrow. “There’s skating and ice sailing and coasting and snowballing and lots of things.”

“Not forgetting muskratting and fishing through the ice,” added Fred. “Maybe we didn’t have a lot of fun the winter we spent up in Snowtop Camp, eh, fellows?”

“You bet we did,” agreed Sparrow, and launched into a long description of that memorable winter holiday in the Big Woods, not forgetting the bear and the wildcat and the snowslide that buried the house, and other adventures, to all of which Lee Cartier listened with the most rapt attention and interest.

“It must have been great,” he murmured with a sigh of envy. “I can see that I’ve got a lot of fun waiting for me as soon as I can get outdoors again. And I hope it won’t be long till then. The doctor said to-day that I could probably be outdoors in a week.”

“That’s bully,” said Bobby. “But do you really mean, Lee, that you’ve never seen snow before?”

“Oh, I’ve seen little flurries of it once or twice,” replied Lee, “but it’s never amounted to anything, and it’s melted just as soon as it struck the ground. Down in Louisiana, where I come from, it’s practically summer all the year round. While it’s been snowing here to-day, people have been going in swimming down there. The darkeys are going round barefooted, women are fanning themselves, and men are going round on the shady side of the street.”

“Nobody getting sunstruck, is there?” queried Fred with a grin.

“Well, perhaps not as bad as that,” smiled Lee, “but take it altogether it’s almost as different there from what it is here as day is from night.”

“I saw a picture the other day of some boys shinning up cocoanut trees somewhere in the middle of January,” remarked Sparrow. “It seems funny to think there should be such differences in the same country.”

“I’d like to spend some time down South,” said Bobby. “I’ve been out West and almost everywhere else in the country except the South. Of course we had a taste of what it was like when we went to Porto Rico. But I’d like to be somewhere in the South for weeks at a time, and learn just how different things are from what they are here up North.”

“You’d enjoy it all right,” affirmed Lee. “You can fairly live outdoors all the year round, and you’d find lots of things that would be strange and interesting. I’d like to have you on my place where I could go round with you and show you the sights.”