We looked quick, and who should we see but Collins and Jiggins, in their boat, coming for us as hard as they could come.
CHAPTER XII
Maybe you’ve never noticed it, but when anything dangerous or exciting or unexpected happens your body does something or other without your knowing what it is going to do and without your asking it to do it. You say you were startled into doing whatever it was. Maybe that’s the explanation of it, but Mark Tidd says it’s the instinct of self-preservation. He knows a lot of words like that.
Well, this instinct of self-preservation made Mark and me do the same thing at the same time. It made us dig our paddles into the water and scoot down-stream as fast as we could make the canoe go.
A canoe is a lot faster and easier to handle than a scow—even a special scow made for the river. When we first saw Jiggins and Collins in their boat they weren’t more than a hundred feet from us, and they had the advantage of getting started first. After we got started they didn’t gain, though. We didn’t gain much, either, because what our canoe gave us in lightness they made up in strength.
They were too busy to yell at us, and we had our hands full without doing any talking in particular. We just dug in.
After a few minutes Mark whispered, “How we m-makin’ it?”
“Holdin’ our own,” says I.
At that rate they’d catch us, or at least Mark said so.
“We’ll t-tire first,” says he. “They can k-keep it up longer than we can.”