“Why! what does he think?” considered Jessie, amazed. “That I am going to stop and let him and Burd beat us? I—guess—not!”
Then she heard the voice of the lifeguard. He was driving his boat inshore with mighty strokes; but he sat facing shoreward, too, using his oars back-handed. He shouted:
“Shark! Shark! Look out for the shark!”
And behind Jessie Norwood her chum took up the cry:
“Shark! Oh, Jess! Shark!”
The word, which had never meant much to Jessie Norwood in her life before, being merely the name of a quite unknown fish, suddenly became the most important of words! She whirled over and took up the breast stroke. She rose high in the water again to look.
Off at one side and seemingly swimming toward them from a tangent, came a gray, sail-like thing, the like of which the Roselawn girl had never seen before. She accepted as true however the identification of the lifeguard. He should know.
The race to the raft became suddenly a double race. More than ever did Jessie Norwood wish to win it! She desired to outswim the dangerous fish of which she had heard such terrible stories.
CHAPTER XIII—MORE THAN ONE ADVENTURE
Jessie was badly frightened, but she was not too scared to swim as hard as she could for the diving raft. The lifeguard drove his boat around the end of the raft toward the gray, sail-like object which had so startled them all. Jessie remembered of reading that the dorsal fin of a shark shows above water when it swims at the surface. This odd looking thing must be it—it must be!