Bobby Blake on a Plantation: or, Lost in the Great Swamp. Warner Frank A.
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.
CHAPTER VI
FIRE!
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.”
“That would be fine,” agreed Bobby. “What town in Louisiana do you live in, Lee?”
“I don’t live in any town,” replied Lee. “The nearest town is Raneleigh, and that isn’t much more than a store and a railroad station. Mother and I live on a plantation. My folks have lived there for generations. My great-grandfather had the property in the old days when Louisiana belonged to France.”
“I guessed you were French or of French descent because of the name,” said Bobby. “Let’s see, wasn’t there a Cartier who had something to do with the discovery of America?”
“There was a Cartier who discovered parts of America in 1534,” replied Lee, “and he, I believe, was an ancestor of mine. That’s one bit of history that’s been pretty well dinned into me,” he added with a smile. “Our people, you know, put a lot of value on their ancestry, though I never cared much for it. My mother too was of French descent, as one can tell from her first name, Celeste.”
“Is the plantation a big one?” asked Bobby.
“Pretty big,” replied Lee, “though not as big as it was before the Civil War. That was in the days when people kept slaves, and our folk had a lot of them and thousands of acres of land. But after the war was over, a lot of the land was sold, and now we have only a few hundred acres. And I don’t know how long we’ll have that,” he added, a shadow coming over his brow.
“What do you mean?” asked Fred with ready sympathy.
“Oh, we’re having trouble about the boundary lines of the property,” explained Lee. “Some of the stones that mark the lines are missing, and there’s a neighbor of ours named Boolus who’s claiming part of the property. We’re sure he is wrong, but we’re not able to prove it, and he’s making us lots of trouble. He’s one of the meanest men in the parish and everybody hates and despises him. But he’s got lots of money and