Tom Bigden and his cousins never knew how near they came to being black-balled when their names were brought before the canoe club at its next meeting. Prime and his friends were suspicious of Tom. The latter kept away from the drug-store altogether; he and his cousins were often seen in Joe Wayring’s company, and Prime said that looked as though Tom wasn’t in earnest when he promised to assist in carrying out the arrangements that had been made for defeating Joe and Arthur at the coming canoe meet.
“I’ll vote for him,” said Prime, after Noble, Scott, and one or two others had labored with him for a long time, “but if he plays us false, as I really think he means to do, he can just hang up his fiddle, so far as the Toxophilites are concerned. I’ll take pains to let Miss Arden and the rest of the girls know that he and his cousins smoke and play billiards and cards on the sly, and they’ll make dough of his cake in short order.”
“The agony is over at last,” said Tom, after Joe Wayring and his inseparable companions Arthur and Roy, who came over in the _Young Republic_ the next morning to announce the result of the ballot, had gone home again. “Bear in mind, now, that we are to stick to our original programme and win if we can. If we find that we have no show, and that the prizes must go to Wayring and his friends, or to Prime and his followers, we’ll stand by Wayring every time. We’ll teach that drug-store crowd that the next time they make up a slate they had better put our names on it if they expect us to help them.”
It never occurred to Tom and his cousins that possibly Joe Wayring, and all the other boys who believed that friendly trials of strength and skill, like those that were to come off during the canoe meet, should be fairly conducted, would not thank them for their interference. Joe had warned all his friends that there were boys in the club who had been “booked” to win by fair means or foul (of course he did not tell them where he got his information), and they made some pretty shrewd guesses as to who those boys were. Being forewarned they were forearmed, and they did not want any help. Tom found it out on the day the races came off.
THE first thing the members of the canoe club did when they sprang out of bed on the morning of the second day of August, was to run to the window, draw aside the curtain and take a look at the sky and the lake. The one was cloudless, and the surface of the other was rippled by a little breeze which promised, by the time the sun was an hour high, to freshen into a capital sailing wind. For all the members of the club were not so deeply interested in the paddle, portage and hurry-skurry races as Joe Wayring and Tom Bigden were. A few of them were expert sailors, and anxious to show the spectators (there would be more strangers among them this year than ever before), how skillfully they could manage their cranky little boats when they were under canvas.