“It’s too bad I spoiled the race,” mumbled Blumpo. “But that’s just me—always putting my foot into it.”
“I guess you put more than your foot into it this time,” was Harry’s good-natured comment, as he ran close up alongside.
“Where shall I land you, Blumpo?” questioned Jerry Upton.
“Anywhere but near the boathouse,” returned Blumpo, with a shiver that was not brought on entirely by his involuntary bath. “If you land me there the fellows won’t give me a chance to get out of sight.”
“I’ll take you up the lake shore if you wish,” said Jerry. “I intended to go up anyway in a row-boat.”
“All right, Jerry, do that and I’ll be much obliged to you,” returned Blumpo Brown.
“You are going along, aren’t you, Harry?” continued Jerry, turning to his late rival.
“Yes, I want to stop at Mrs. Fleming’s cottage,” replied Harry Parker.
In a moment more Harry had turned his shell over to old Jack Broxton and had leaped into a row-boat.
“Ain’t you fellows going to try it over again?” asked several on the shore, anxiously.
“Not now,” returned Jerry. Then he went on to Harry, in a lower tone: “I didn’t expect to make a public exhibition of our little trial at speed, did you?”
“No; not at all. It was a tie, and let it remain so.”
Jerry soon left his shell; and then four oars soon took the row-boat far away from the vicinity of the shore; and while the three boys are on their way up the lake, let us learn a little more concerning them, especially as they are to form the all-important characters of this tale of midsummer adventures.
Jerry Upton was the only son of a well-to-do farmer, whose farm of one hundred acres lay just beyond the outskirts of Lakeview, and close to the lake shore. Jerry was a scholar at the Lakeview Academy, and did but little on the farm, although among the pupils he was often designated as Cornfield.
Harry Parker was the oldest boy in the Parker family, which numbered two boys and four girls. Harry’s father was a shoe manufacturer, whose large factory was situated in Lakeview, and at which nearly a fourth of the working population of the town found employment.
It had been a singular incident which had brought the two boys together and made them firm friends. Both had been out skating on the lake the winter before, when Harry had lost his skate and gone down headlong directly in the track of a large ice-boat, which was coming on with the speed of a breeze that was almost a hurricane.