“Wrong!” returned Mary Cox.  “The true quotation should be, ’He laughs best whose laugh lasts.’  And mine is going to last—­oh-he! here comes another!”

Tom and Ruth got the dinner.  There was plenty of dry wood under the fir trees.  Tom cleaned the fish and Ruth fried them to a delicious brownness and crispness.  With the other viands brought from home and cups of good, hot coffee, the thirteen friends made a hearty and hilarious meal.

They were sheltered by the high cliff at their backs and did not notice when the snow began to fall.  But, after a time, they suddenly discovered that the flakes were coming so thick and fast that it was all but impossible to see the farthest fishing shelters.

“Oh, dear me! we don’t want to go back yet,” wailed The Fox.  “And we were catching them so fast.  Do, do let’s wait a while longer.”

“Not much fun if it keeps on snowing this way,” objected Bobbins.

“Don’t begin croaking, little boy,” advised his sister.  “A few flakes of snow won’t hurt us.”

Nevertheless, the storm did not hold up.  It was more than a “flurry” and some of the others, as well as Bob Steele, began to feel anxious.

CHAPTER XXI

JERRY’S CAVE

For a while they tried to shelter themselves with the canvas, and shouted back and forth through the falling snow that they were having a “scrumptious” time.  But some of the girls, as Isadore said, “began to weaken.”

“We don’t want to be lost in the snow as we were the time we went for balsam at Snow Camp,” said Helen.

“How can you get lost—­with us fellows along?” demanded Busy Izzy, in vast disgust.

“Can’t a boy be lost?” demanded Ann Hicks, laughing.

“Not on your life!” declared the irrepressible Isadore.

But just then Madge Steele got up and declared she had had enough.  “This hole in the ice is filling up with snow.  We’ll lose the fish we’ve already caught if we don’t look out.  Come on, Bobby, and get mine.”

So it was agreed to cut the fishing short for that day, although The Fox declared she could have beaten them all in another hour.

However, they had a great load of the frozen fish.  Besides what they had eaten for dinner, there were at least a hundred handsome fellows, and the boys had strung each fisher’s catch on a birch twig which they had cut and trimmed while coming down to the lake that morning.

Tom and Ruth, left at the campfire to clean up after the mid-day meal, were shouting for them to come in.  The girls left the boys to wind up the fishlines and “strike camp,” as Ralph called taking down the pieces of canvas, and all hustled for the shore.  They crowded around the fire, threw on more fuel, danced to get their feet warm, and called to the boys to hurry.

The five boys had their hands full in retrieving all the chairs, and canvas sheets, and fish lines, and sacks.  When they got them all in and packed upon the bobsled for transportation, the snow was a foot deep on the ice and it was snowing so fast that one could not see ten feet into the swirling heart of the storm.