The most popular of the story-tellers was B.J., whose favorite and most successful yarn was the account of the great ice-boat adventure, when the hockey team was wrecked upon Buzzard’s Rock, and spent the night in the snow-drifts, with the blizzard howling outside.  The memory of that terrible escape made the blood run cold in the veins of the other members of the club; but it aroused in B.J. only a new and irresistible desire to be off again upon the same adventure-hunt.

Now, B.J.’s father was an enthusiastic sailor—­fortunately, not so rash a sailor as his son, but quite as great a lover of a “flowing sail.”  Wind-lover as he was, he could not spend a winter idly, and turned his attention to ice-boating.

He owned a beautiful modern vessel made of basswood, butternut, and pine, with rigging all of steel, and a runner-plank as springy as an umbrella frame.  She carried no more than four hundred square feet of sail; but when he gave her the whip, and let her take to her heels, she outran the fleetest wind that ever swept the lake.

And she skipped and sported along near the railroad track, where the express-train raced in vain with her; for she could make her sixty miles an hour or more without gasping for breath.

She was named Greased Lightning.

Now, B.J.’s father had ample cause to be suspicious of that young man’s discretion, and he never permitted him to take the boat out alone, good sailor as he knew his son to be; so B.J. had to content himself with parties of boys and girls hilarious with the cold and speed, and wrapped up tamely in great blankets, under the charge of his father, who was a more than cautious sailor, being as wise as he was old, and seeing the foolishness of those pleasures which depend only on risking bone and body.

But B.J. was wretched, and chafed under the restraint of such respectable amusement—­with girls, too!

And when, in the midst of the holidays, his father was called out of town, B.J. went to bed, and could hardly fall asleep under the conspiracies he began to form for eloping on one last escapade with the ice-boat.

He woke soon after daybreak, the next morning, and hurried to his window.  There he found a gale of wind blowing and lashing the earth with a furious rain.  The wind he received with welcoming heart, but the rain sent terror there; for it told him that the ice would soon disappear, and he would be sent back to Kingston Academy, with never a chance to let loose the Greased Lightning.

“It is now or never!” mumbled B.J., clenching his teeth after the manner of all well-regulated desperados.

XVIII

He sneaked into his clothes, and descended the cold, creaking staircase in his stocking-feet.  Then he put on his rubber boots, and stole out of the house like a burglar.

The wind would have wrecked any umbrella alive; but he cared naught for the rain, and hurried down the street where the Twins were sleeping the sleep of the righteous.  He threw pebbles at their windows till they were awakened; and after a proper amount of deliberation in which each requested the other to go to the window, both went hand in hand on their shivering toes.