“We’ll race you!” he bawled.
An answering gesture showed that he had been heard, and the figure disappeared. In another moment the two yachts were abreast, and the stranger swung about and took the wind. She had two persons aboard, a man and a woman, both so wrapped from the weather as to be scarcely distinguishable. She was a much larger boat than The Sleet, sloop-rigged, with immaculate white sails and without side-timbers. She wore no paint, but her woodwork was varnished until it shone. Altogether there was scarcely any comparison between the two yachts, so immeasurably superior was the sloop in every detail.
The Sleet meanwhile had gained an eighth of a mile, perhaps, ere the stranger had found the wind, but now the latter came booming after them at a spanking gait, her big sails as stiff as though frozen. Carl grinned.
“It’ll be a mighty short race, my boys. She can sail all around this little triangle. But we’ll give her a go, just the same.” He brought The Sleet closer to the wind, and then began a series of long tacks that sent the boat fairly flying over the ice. But the stranger was already at the same tactics, and ere a mile had passed was abreast of The Sleet, though at the other side of the river, and her crew were waving derisively across.
“Well, if we had as much sail as you have,” growled Carl, “we might be in your class; as it is, we aren’t. But The Sleet is a good goer, all the same.”
The other boat stood across into the middle of the river, and then, as though her former efforts had been but the merest dawdling, bounded away, and was soon but a small white speck far up the ice in the haze.
“Let’s turn back now,” suggested Dick. “It must be getting toward half-past five, and you must remember that we won’t be able to make as fast time going down the river as we have coming up.”
“All right, we’ll turn in a minute.”
And then Carl, whose knowledge of ice-yachting was derived from the hurried perusal of a library book on the subject, cudgeled his brains to recollect how to “go about.” Of course, he might lower the sail and then bring her around, but that would be a most clumsy, unsportsmanlike method, and so not to be seriously considered. Presumably, the thing to do was to luff.