By unanimous agreement Dr. Charles P. Vorhees, now a sedate and high-salaried official in Uncle Sam's Weather Bureau, but a few years ago a well-known athletic star at Yale, was made referee of the contests. His own reputation in athletics had been such as to preclude even a suspicion of partisanship or favoritism in his decisions, and further than that he was personally popular with every air-man there.
"Let's make at least part of this contest different from the average," suggested Dr. Vorhees, as the men gathered about to hear his suggestions. "Men in your line of work expect and even seek the unusual, rather than the ordinary. You get your thrills out of doing new things. Very well, then, instead of trying to lay out a track over the driest parts of the field, let's select a course over the soggiest sections, and then have a race with some real difficulties in it."
"Sure; just the thing," came half a dozen voices in unison.
And then the brilliant mind of Archie Brown, of the Falcon crew, added another novel thought.
"Why not do it on snowshoes?" he offered. "The going is heavy enough, and that ought to help make it unusual."
"Gee! Snowshoeing in the mud! Corking idea!"
The chorus of approval left no doubt that in this aggregation no task was regarded as really hard, no difficulty as insurmountable.
"But where would we get the snowshoes?" asked Dr. Vorhees, shaking with laughter as he surveyed the heavily mudded field, and already seeing in prospect the ludicrous probabilities of such a contest as Brown had suggested.
"Leave it to me," the latter replied. "It was having seen twenty or thirty pairs only last night that brought the thing to my mind."
He trotted off across the field, to where a bleak building stood out uninvitingly against the horizon. It was the general storehouse of the coast guard station at that point, and was in charge of the ex-whaling captain with whom Big Jack Carew had discussed Newfoundland weather conditions on his first morning there. And the former whaler, it proved, was as good a sport as he was skipper.