“Mr. Duncan, do you know, but the Johnnie’s got a chance to win this race?”
“D’y’think so, Tommie––d’y’think so?”
Some of us in the crew had been thinking of that same thing some time, and we watched Mr. Duncan, who, with a life line about him, was clinging to a bitt aft, and watching things with tight lips, a drawn face and shiny eyes. We listened to hear what else he might have to say. But he didn’t realize at once what it meant. His eyes and his mind were on the Lucy Foster.
“What d’y’think of the Lucy and the Withrow, Tommie?” Mr. Duncan said next.
Tommie took a fresh look at the Lucy Foster, which was certainly doing stunts. It was along this time that big Jim Murch––a tall man, but even so, he was no more than six feet four, and 259 the Lucy twenty-four feet beam––was swinging from the ring-bolts under the windward rail and throwing his feet out trying to touch with his heels the sea that was swashing up on the Lucy’s deck. And every once in a while he did touch, for the Lucy, feeling the need of her ballast, was making pretty heavy weather of it. Every time she rolled and her sheer poles went under, Jim would holler out that he’d touched again.
We could hear him over on the Johnnie at times. Mr. Duncan, who believed that nothing ever built could beat the Lucy Foster, began to worry at that, and again he spoke to Clancy. He had to holler to make himself heard.
“But what do you think of the Lucy’s chances, Tommie?”
Clancy shook his head.
And getting nothing out of Clancy, Mr. Duncan called out then: “What do you think of the Lucy, you, Captain Blake?”
The skipper shook his head, too. “I’m afraid it’s too much for her.”