“Cap’n Bill may be nuthin’ but a kid, but he knows how ter git out o’ the Twilight all the speed that’s in her,” Cap’n Seth told them as he cast an anxious eye from the window toward the other boat. “An’ he ain’t got more’n about 20,000 logs in that raft, an’ we’ve got thirty, an’ it takes a lot o’ power ter pull that extra 10,000 through the water, let me tell yer.”
An hour passed and still another, and it could not be seen that either boat had gained on the other. Their course toward the same goal was bringing them, all the time, closer together and now they were not more than a mile apart.
“Tom made a mistake when he didn’t fix up a small raft for us to tow across,” Bob declared, as he leaned on the rail and watched the other boat. “Then we’d have been there first without any trouble.”
“No doubt about that,” Jack agreed, “but it’s too late now and I believe we’ll win out at that.”
Two more hours slipped by without any change in the relative positions of the two boats. They were making about two miles an hour and were about half way across the lake.
During the last hour Bob had been in the pilot-house with Cap’n Seth, but now he joined his brother who was standing in the stern.
“Of all the slow races this takes the cake,” he grumbled, as he sat down on a coil of rope.
“Yep, it’s all of that and then some,” Jack agreed. “I don’t believe either boat has gained a foot in the last four hours. Suppose we both get there at the same time?”
“I don’t know what we’d do in that case unless we flipped a coin for it,” Bob smiled.
The boats were now not more than a mile apart and, in the clear air, the boys could see a number of men in the stern of the Twilight.