“I like that!” gasped Lettie, clenching her little gloved fist. “Oh! I wish sometimes I was a boy, Billy Speedwell!”
“Gee, Lettie! Isn’t it lucky you’re not?” he gasped. “There’d be no living in the same town with you. I like you a whole lot better as you are——”
Dan and Mildred laughed, but Lettie was very red in the face still, and not at all pacified, as she declared:
“I believe I’d die content if I could just trounce you once—as you should be trounced!”
“Help! help! Ath-thith-tance, pleath!” begged Billy, keeping just out of the red-haired girl’s reach. “If you ever undertook to thrash me, Lettie, I know I’d just be scared to death.”
“Come now,” urged Mildred. “You are both delaying the game. And it’s cold here on the street corner. I want to know.”
“And what do you want to know, Miss?” demanded Billy.
“Why, I can tell you what we did last evening, if that’s what you want to know, Mildred,” said Dan, easily. “There’s nothing secret about it.”
“You can’t be going to plan any boat races this time of year?” exclaimed Lettie. “The paper says we’re going to have a hard winter and the Colasha steamboat line has laid off all its hands and closed up for the season. They say the river is likely to be impassable until spring.”
“That’s all you know about it,” interposed Billy. “We just _did_ agree to have boat races on the river last evening. Now, then! what do you think?”
“I think all the Riverdale boys are crazy,” returned Lettie, promptly.
“Poof! Boat racing! Likely story,” grumbled the red-haired girl.
“Now, isn’t that the truth, Dan?” demanded Billy, but careful to circle well around Miss Parker to put his brother and Mildred between himself and the county clerk’s daughter.
“As far as it goes,” admitted Dan, chuckling. “But he doesn’t go far enough. We did talk some about having boat races—iceboat races.”
“Oh, ho!” cried Lettie. Her eyes flashed and she began to smile again. “Iceboats, Dannie? Really?”
“But I thought they were so dangerous?” demurred Mildred, rather timidly. “Didn’t Monroe Stevens and somebody else almost get drowned yesterday morning trying out an iceboat?”
“’Deed they did,” admitted Billy. “But the river wasn’t fit.”
“And you boys got them out of the water, too!” exclaimed Lettie, suddenly. “I heard about it.”