Spink had gone at it just as he went at everything—with marvelous confidence. With motor sputtering and his big sail, bellied full, he shot ahead of the other four boats in the race and was quickly at the Long Bridge.
Here he had to drop the sail, for it interfered with the Streak o’ Light getting through. His motor coughed and the iceboat went ahead jerkily enough.
Dan and Billy had taken a rather long shoot to windward; now the Follow Me came up to the bridge on the other tack, and Dan started the motor just before his sail began to shake.
The momentum they had gathered carried the boat under the structure. At once the sail filled on the upper side, and the Follow Me proved her name to be good. She led the five iceboats, and the crowd of spectators that crowded the bridge cheered the Speedwell boys as their craft darted up the river.
It was not until then that she began to really move.
The boys had sailed pretty fast in her before. But now the whole stretch of the river lay before her. There was nothing in the way, and the wind was fair. Under the pressure of both wind and claw-wheel under the main beam, she hit only the high places, as Billy declared.
Dan tried to steer clear of the higher drifts; but sometimes she would run up the long slope of a hummock and shoot right out into the air. Those on shore could see the daylight between the runners of the Follow Me and the crust of ice.
At such times Dan was glad he had rigged his sprocket wheel so that he could raise her. The motor raced, but the moment the runners connected with the ice again, Dan drove the wheel down and the added impetus of the whirling claws aided in the speed of the boat.
Billy hung to the end of the crossbeam and laughed back at the other boats. He could afford to. Even Barry Spink’s wonderful craft was being left behind. Before they passed the end of Island Number One, the Follow Me was a mile and more in the lead.
And the boys kept this lead for the entire distance to Karnac Lake. When they turned the stake and started to beat back, the pace was more moderate. But here was where Dan’s invention “made good.”