“I don’t think it was a tie,” declared Andy. “It looked to me as if Jack was at least six inches ahead.”
“That’s the way it looked to me, too,” said his twin.
“Rover ahead? Nonsense!” cried one of the Sedley supporters. “If anybody was ahead it was Joe.”
“Oh, it was a tie, and that’s all there is to it,” put in a gentleman who lived at Dexter’s Corners. “They’ll have to ride it over again.”
It was the consensus of opinion among those who had seen the finish of the race that it had been a tie.
“We’ll let the photographs decide it,” declared Fred. “A whole lot of pictures of the finish were snapped. They ought to tell the tale. Come, what do you say?” he went on to the young man who had been managing the race for Joe Sedley.
“I’m willing to go by the photographs if they’re clear enough,” was the reply.
“Well, photographs don’t lie,” said the gentleman from Dexter’s Corners.
And now while Jack and Joe Sedley are turning back to the finish line to find out how the race was really decided let me take a few minutes of the readers’ time in which to introduce my characters to those who have not met the Rovers before.
In the first volume of this line of books, entitled “The Rover Boys at School,” I introduced three wideawake American lads, Dick, Tom and Sam Rover, and told how they left their home at Valley Brook Farm to go to school. From school they went through college, having many adventures in the between-times, and then settled down in business in New York City, forming The Rover Company, with offices in Wall Street.