"No fool, that fellow," growled Boardman, puffing laboriously to extricate one foot that seemed to be drawn down into the ground with the tenacious pull and grip of a suction pump. "He's got the laugh on us all right."
"Who-o-r-rp!" Henryson, a little in the lead, turning for an instant to make a reply, had miscalculated grievously, and now, a victim of his own folly in having even for a second taken his eyes from his course, was lying face downward in a morass of slimy mud, his arms working like the paddle wheels of a ferryboat.
There was a shout of derisive laughter from behind, as there had been every time any one had, as Donald expressed it, "bitten the dust." But Henryson, naturally a poor sport and sour-natured, was doubly angered and chagrined not alone by the stagnant depths into which his unhappy disaster had precipitated him, but also by the fact that he had lost the lead and at least three others were now ahead of him. It was left to happy Andy Flures to reap the full measure of the Norwegian's wrath.
Three times Andy himself had been down in the mud, but each time he had come up smiling and more determined than ever to finish the race.
"Why the tail-dip?" he asked of Henryson as he came up; and there was another gale of laughter.
Henryson's color rose and showed through pink, even under his facial covering of mire. He muttered something under his breath, and then, instead of being cooled by that brief outlet to his anger, completely lost control of himself.
He suddenly bent forward, as though to tighten his shoe, grasped a handful of mud, and before Andy could realize his intention or even shield himself from it, Henryson hurled it, striking Flures squarely in the face.
There was a gasp from the men behind, and a shout of anger from the old whaling captain. Involuntarily everyone came to a halt.