“Yes, I want to stop at Mrs. Fleming’s cottage,” replied Harry Parker.
In a moment more Harry had turned his shell over to old Jack Broxton and had leaped into a row-boat.
“Ain’t you fellows going to try it over again?” asked several on the shore, anxiously.
“Not now,” returned Jerry. Then he went on to Harry, in a lower tone: “I didn’t expect to make a public exhibition of our little trial at speed, did you?”
“No; not at all. It was a tie, and let it remain so.”
Jerry soon left his shell; and then four oars soon took the row-boat far away from the vicinity of the shore; and while the three boys are on their way up the lake, let us learn a little more concerning them, especially as they are to form the all-important characters of this tale of midsummer adventures.
Jerry Upton was the only son of a well-to-do farmer, whose farm of one hundred acres lay just beyond the outskirts of Lakeview, and close to the lake shore. Jerry was a scholar at the Lakeview Academy, and did but little on the farm, although among the pupils he was often designated as Cornfield.
Harry Parker was the oldest boy in the Parker family, which numbered two boys and four girls. Harry’s father was a shoe manufacturer, whose large factory was situated in Lakeview, and at which nearly a fourth of the working population of the town found employment.
It had been a singular incident which had brought the two boys together and made them firm friends. Both had been out skating on the lake the winter before, when Harry had lost his skate and gone down headlong directly in the track of a large ice-boat, which was coming on with the speed of a breeze that was almost a hurricane.
To the onlookers it seemed certain that Harry must be struck and killed by the sharp prow of the somewhat clumsy craft. But in that time of extreme peril Jerry had whipped up like a flash on his skates, caught Harry by the collar, and literally flung himself and the boy, who was then almost a stranger to him, out of harm’s way.