“I am proud of the Alice,” answered Jack. “She did all that I expected of her.”
Bob Anderson took his defeat calmly, but the Pornell Academy students were very bitter, Roy Bock and his cronies especially. Bock and the others had lost considerable money on the contest and this galled them exceedingly. They could not understand how the Alice had forged ahead when it looked as if she was beaten.
“Guess Century must have stood in with the Putnam Hall fellows,” growled Bock.
“That is absolutely false!” cried one of the students who had helped to sail the Ajax. A wordy war followed, and in the end Roy Bock got his nose punched, which made him more angry than ever.
Ritter, Paxton and Coulter were much downcast by the way the race had terminated. All their plans to do Jack’s boat an injury had failed, and how they were going to meet their money obligations they did not know.
“We are up against it good and hard,” said Ritter.
“I’ve got a plan,” said Coulter. “Roy Bock is dead sore over this. He thinks there was some understanding between Century and Jack Ruddy. Let us see if we can’t get him to make some kind of a protest, and we can back him up in it. Perhaps we can have the bets declared off.”
This plot met with instant favor at Reff Ritter’s hands and he lost no time in interviewing Roy Bock. Bock did not want to run the risk of another encounter with the Century crowd, yet he, too, could not afford to lose the money he had staked on the contest.
“Let us talk this over all around,” said he, and called in several of his cronies. Later he and his friends, with Ritter, Paxton and Coulter, went to one of the judges of the contest.
“We think this race ought to be declared off,” said Bock.