CHAPTER XI

All ready to race, but-----

On the landing stage at the Hotel Pleasant a group of girls stood on the following Tuesday morning.

“Wouldn’t Dick and Dave and the rest of their crowd enjoy this lake if they were here with their canoe?” asked Laura Bentley.

“Yes,” agreed Belle Meade.  “And very likely they’d win some more laurels for Gridley High School, too.  Preston High School has a six-paddle canoe here now, and Trentville High School will send a canoe crew here in a few days.  Oh, how I wish the boys could manage to get here with their war canoe!”

“It seems too bad, doesn’t it,” remarked Clara Marshall, “that some of the nicest boys in our high school are so poor that they can’t do the ordinary things they would like to do?”

“Some of the boys in Dick & Co. won’t be poor when they’ve been out of school ten years,” Laura predicted, with a glowing face.

“I don’t believe any of them will be poor by that time,” agreed Clara.  “But it must hurt them a good deal, just now, not to have more money.”

“I wish they could be here now,” sighed Laura.

“You want to see Gridley High School win more laurels in sports and athletics?” asked another girl.

“Yes,” assented Miss Bentley, “and I’d like to see the boys here, anyway, whether they won a canoe race or not.”

“There’s a crew canoe putting off from the other side now!” announced Belle Meade.

“That’s probably Preston High School,” said Laura.

“Have the Preston boys a war canoe, too?” asked one of the girls, shading her eyes with her hand, and staring hard at the canoe across the lake, some three quarters of a mile away.

“Someone at the hotel said the Preston boys have a cedar and canvas canoe,” Laura replied.

“That’s a birch-bark canoe over yonder,” declared the girl who was studying the distant craft so intently.  “I can tell by the way the sun shines on the wet places along the sides of the canoe.”

The other girls were now looking eagerly.  “Wait a moment,” begged Clara, and, turning, sped lightly to the boathouse near by.  She returned with a telescope.

“Hurry!” begged Laura Bentley as Clara started to focus the telescope.

“You take it,” proposed Clara generously, passing the glass to Laura.

Laura soon had the telescope focused.

“Hurrah, girls!” she cried.  “That’s the war canoe from Gridley, and Dick & Co. are in it.”

She passed the glass to Belle Meade, who took an eager peep through it.

“Hurrah!  Gridley High School!  Hurrah!” chorused the other girls.

Their voices must have traveled across the water, for Prescott, at the stern of the war canoe, suddenly gave a couple of strokes with his wet, flashing paddle, that swung the prow around, driving the canoe straight in the direction of the landing float.