“Suppose we get down all right,” said Loren. “How are we going to get back?”
“We’ll shoulder our canoes and come up the portage road which has been cut through the woods around the rapids. For that reason we don’t want to take any thing with us that we can possibly dispense with.”
After listening to a few more hints like these, Tom and his cousins set out for the post-office; and having secured their mail they went home by the road that led around the foot of the lake, running at the top of their speed all the way through the woods to improve their wind. Their skiff, patent minnow buckets and dip nets were at once brought into requisition, and by the time the supper bell rang, they had caught bait enough to last them through a long day’s successful angling.
Promptly at four o’clock the next morning Tom Bigden opened the front door of the boat-house, and waved his hat in response to a similar signal of greeting which came to him from over the lake. Joe Wayring and his friends were just putting their canoes into the water.
“Splendid day,” said the former, when the two little fleets came together near the middle of the lake. “There’s going to be just wind enough to ripple the water, but not enough to raise a sea, and I wouldn’t take a dollar for my chance of catching the finest string of bass that has been seen in Mount Airy this year.”
“So say we all of us,” exclaimed Sheldon; and this suggested the song which every school-boy knows, but to Tom Bigden’s ill-concealed disgust, it was sung to the words: “Joe Wayring is a jolly good fellow,” and that was a sentiment in which Tom did not fully concur. It put him in bad humor for the whole of the day, or, rather, until circumstances threw in his way an opportunity to make that jolly good fellow as miserable as he was himself. After that he felt better.
Under the steady motion of the sinewy arms which swung the long double paddles, the light canoes made quick work with the three miles that lay between the boat-houses and the lower end of the lake, and presently Arthur Hastings turned toward the nearest shore, looking over his shoulder as he did so to call out to the canoeists behind him:
“Let’s make believe this is a hurry-skurry race, and that there is a prize in the pond waiting for the man who reaches the bottom of the rapids first.”
The challenge was promptly accepted. In a twinkling the little crafts were going toward the beach with greatly increased speed, and in a remarkably short space of time six young athletes, clad only in flesh-colored tights, were prancing around their canoes, busily engaged in wrapping their clothing in their water-proof blankets, and lashing their rods and minnow buckets fast so that they would not be thrown out into the water by a heavy lurch, or even by a capsize. Tom Bigden was the first to shove his canoe away from the shore, but there he had to stop. He was not acquainted with the channel, and needed a guide to show him the way through; but he won the second place, and was prompt to fall into it when Arthur Hastings caught up his paddle and pulled away from the beach.
Tom and his cousins had often viewed the rapids from the bank while trying in vain to screw up courage enough to attempt their passage, and if they looked dangerous to them then, they looked ten times more frightful when they surveyed them from their canoes on this particular morning. The sight of them was enough to make any body’s nerves quiver. They looked as steep as the roof of a house, and the bottom of the gorge through which they ran, seemed to be literally covered with bowlders. Tom could not see a single place which looked wide enough to admit of the passage of a canoe.