People ashore shouted and cheered, and the boys acknowledged the salute by waving their caps on high.
“Hurrah, for the last twenty miles!” Kenneth shouted suddenly, then settled himself for the struggle to come.
It was a dead beat out to the open lake through the three-hundred-foot-wide channel between the long piers. The wind blew so hard that the spray obscured the piers from sight at times, and it seemed impossible that any vessel propelled by sails could make way against it.
Kenneth planned to clear the south pier with the first long tack. As the yacht sped down towards the opening to the lake—choked as it was with the smothering seas—he realized that he had undertaken a very hazardous thing—realized that failure to clear the breakwater on that tack would mean instant destruction against the bulkhead.
As they came nearer and nearer the rock-ballasted spiles, Kenneth noticed that his boat was not pointing as high up into the wind as usual, and that no matter how hard he jammed the helm over, she would not head right. Instead of making the long angle that would bring her clear of the end, the “Gazelle” was heading, in spite of all her skipper could do, twenty feet in. The yacht acted queerly, but was making tremendous speed. Nearer and nearer she came to the spiles partly obscured by the spray; nearer and nearer, till the very slap and hiss of the waves against them was heard.
The “Gazelle” was pointed straight at a group of logs some twenty feet from the end. Kenneth was puzzled and worried, almost frantic, indeed—never had his boat acted in this way before.
Despairingly he looked across at the rapidly narrowing strip of foam-flecked water, when his quick eye caught a glimpse of the jib sheet caught on the bitts.
“The jib sheet is fouled. Quick, clear it! Lively now, boys!”
In an instant it was done. The sail flew out to its rightful position, and the “Gazelle,” like a racehorse that has been pulled in too much, bounded forward, straight for the end of the pier. In a smother of foam, amid a swirl of angry waters, the good yacht dashed into the open lake, missing the end of the pier by a bare yard.
Kenneth could not hear the cheer that rose from the hundred throats ashore, but he could feel it, and he was grateful.