“It must be Nancy catching up with me,” she thought, but one name on the wind caught her ear, one name shouted over and over and over.
“The _Tidy Jane_, the _Tidy Jane_, the _Tidy Ja-a-ane!_”
How they shouted it, and dwelt on it, and hung to it, until the echoes flung it back from the big bluffs above the shore, but all at once something happened. Polly did not realize it herself, until she caught sight of Nancy’s face, brave and sweet, but deadly white.
Not twenty feet away from the _Tidy Jane_, the prow of the knockabout came about, as Nancy tried her best to overtake her rival. Down on the shore they could hear Tom’s voice shouting,
To Nancy it was the final touch of the spur. She forgot Polly, forgot everything, except the fame of the _Pirate_, and the Junior Cup. She measured the end of the course with a steady, practiced eye, and her distance from the _Tidy Jane_. Nobody but Polly saw how she did it, and even she did not understand the craft of it. It had been a fragment of the Captain’s teaching long ago.
“When the wind and the tide’s agin your making a certain point, jam her down hard into the teeth of it, and give your tiller two sharp turns, hard to port then hard to starboard, and she’ll come up handsomely.”
Straight for the pier the _Pirate_ turned, and then came about, and made for the end of the course.
The other yachts were strung out behind, Dorothy beating up closely, Connie Evans and Sue last of all, and the rest dotting the bay between the _Pirate_ and the _Tidy Jane_.
Polly saw the way Nancy had caught up to her, and for the minute she held her breath. All at once she knew that she was going to lose the race, and the strangest part of it was, she could see Nancy win, and feel a great wave of joy over it. As the _Pirate’s_ boom passed her, she slackened her own main sheet, turned her head and smiled at Nancy, and the first cheer that went up for the winner of the Junior Cup, was when Polly stood up, and waved her hand with a clear,
Tom promptly stood on his head, as the shouts rang out over the bay, and shore. The Admiral himself helped Nancy out as if she had been a queen.
“You did handsomely, little girl, handsomely,” he said.
Polly was hardly a minute behind her, and as she too reached the Orienta pier, and tossed her rope up to the willing hands, she threw her arms around the victor.