Well, it was no disgrace to be beaten by a chap six or seven years your senior, even if you had been given three hundred yards out of nine hundred, thought Tom, in an effort to console himself. But the argument didn’t satisfy him, and he took a deep breath of the good salt air and forgot for a moment that his arms and legs felt as though they belonged to some one else. Then the breakers were forming about him in little hillocks of green water, the encouraging cries of the watchers reached him when his head came dripping above the surface, and—and, almost upon him, sounded the quick and regular splash of the pursuer! Tom closed his eyes tight and tried to forget everything save the man in the blue bathing suit, who, just where the breakers paused before the curve, stood to indicate the finish line. A long swell shot him forward for an instant. Then the returning undertow made it hard fighting.
And now he was in a wide lane formed by the splashing audience and there was but another dozen yards to go. For a moment he began to hope. But for a moment only. The steady strokes of his opponent were loud in his ears now, and as he looked for an instant a brown hand reached forward almost beside him and disappeared, burying itself in the green, froth-streaked water. It was all up! thought Tom. He hated to be beaten, did Tom, and for an instant he felt rather bad. And in that instant two things happened: the crack swimmer drew abreast of him and Tom had an idea. He suddenly remembered that he had always been able to swim faster under water for a short distance than on top, and like a flash he acted on that knowledge. Down went his head and shoulders, his heels kicked in air for a moment like a steamer’s propeller out of water, and then he vanished from the gaze of the laughing, shouting watchers.
One, two, three, four, five strokes he took down there with the pale green, sunlit waters about him; then up he came, thrashing desperately. His foot struck the knee of his opponent, for a moment he had a glimpse of a drawn, set face seen across the surface of the little wavelets, and then it was all over, and he was struggling to his feet and gasping painfully for breath.
“Who won?” was the cry.
The man in the blue bathing suit shook his head ruefully.
“No one,” he answered. “It was the deadest kind of a dead heat. They were side by side. We’ll have to divide first money, I guess,” he added, with a laugh.
The youth with the Mercury’s foot on his jersey came up to Tom with outstretched hand.
“We finished together,” he said smilingly. “But don’t you ever talk to me again about a three-hundred-yards handicap! That was the hardest race ever I was in. My boy, you can certainly swim, and if you’ll keep at it and train off some of that flesh of yours, you’ll have us all beaten by the time you get to college. What’s your name?”
Tom struggled for breath. His heart was beating like a sledge hammer and his lungs were doing what he called afterwards “a double shuffle.”