"When you say 'please,'" shouted I, swimming about.
Doe thereupon took the matter in hand and addressed me:
"Now, Ray, I want you to swim your best. Here's a little kiddy friend of mine I've brought to see you. Mr. Ray, this is Master Moles."
White ignored his companion's playfulness and asked me:
I hurled about five pints of water at him to show that I detected the insult.
"You old Moles!" said Doe. "Serves you right. Why, he's just finished swimming about seventy thousand yards."
"Well, sheer off and let's see you do it," ordered White.
I accordingly swam my fastest to the deep end and back.
"My word!" gasped White. "I didn't know you could swim like that."
"You loon! He could swim before you were born."
Moles seized Doe by the throat and pretended to push him into the water, but characteristically saved him from falling by placing an arm round his waist.
"Apologise," he hissed, "or I'll drop you."
"Moles," replied Doe reproachfully. "At once let me go; or I'll push you in." I rendered my friend immediate assistance by filling White's shoes with water.
"Shut up that!" said he, quickly releasing Doe, who retired from the baths shouting: "Moles, you ugly old elephant, Ray could give you eighty yards in a hundred, and beat you."
This last impertinence suggested an idea to White. He arranged that Cully, Johnson, he, and I should have a private race, "in camera," as he put. The event came off the following day, and I won it with some yards to spare. My three defeated opponents were generous in their praise.
"Golly!" said Johnson. "I thought we'd be last for the Swimming Cup. But snakes alive! we'll get in the semi-final."
"Why, man," declared Cully. "I see us in the final with Erasmus."
"Final be damned!" said White. "Train like navvies and we'll lift the Cup!"
Never did human boy have three more sporting associates in a swimming four than I had in White, Cully, and Johnson. Because I was a year younger than they it was their pleasure to call me the "Baby of the Team," and to take a pride in my successes. They would, in order to pace me, take half-a-length's start in a two-lengths' practice race, and make me strain every nerve to beat them. Or they would time me with their watches over the sixty yards, and, all arriving at different conclusions as to my figures, agree only in the fact that I was establishing records. Once, when according to a stop-watch I really did set up a record, Cully, forgetting his dignity as a prefect in his enthusiasm as a Bramhallite, cried "Alleluia! alleluia!" and hurled Johnson's hat into the air, so that it fell into the water.