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The Border Boys Along the St. Lawrence
The Border Boys Along the St. Lawrence
CHAPTER I
THROUGH THE RAPIDS
“Steady, Ralph, old fellow, the Galoups are right ahead.”
“All right,” responded Ralph Stetson from his position at the steering wheel of the swift motor boat the River Swallow, “I saw them ten minutes ago, Hardware. Just give Persimmons down below a hail and tell him to slow up a bit. They’re wild waters and we don’t want to go through them too fast.”
Harry Ware, who (from the fact that his initials were H. D. Ware) was known to his chums by the nickname Ralph Stetson had just used, hastened to the speaking tube connecting the bridge of the River Swallow with the engine room, in which Percy Simmons, another of Ralph’s chums, was tending the twin racing engines with assiduous care.
“Slow down a bit, Persimmons,” he yelled, “we’re just about to hit up the Gallops.”
“Whoop! Hurray for the Glues!” floated back up the tube, as Persimmons abbreviated the name of the famous rapids into the form by which they were locally known. “Hold tight, everybody. Zing! Zang! Zabella!”
The rapids the boys were approaching had been well named by the early French settlers along the St. Lawrence the Galoups, or, in plain English, the Gallops, or, again, to give them their local name, the Glues.
For two miles or more near the American side of the river the white-capped, racing waters tore along at thirty miles or so an hour. The great rocks that lay concealed under the tumbling foam-covered waters caused the river to boil and swirl like a hundred witches’ caldrons.
To an experienced skipper, however, the Galoups held no particular terrors. All that was needful was familiarity with the intricacies of their currents and whirlpools and they could be “run” in perfect safety. During the three months that the Border Boys had been the guests of Mr. Stetson at his summer home on Dexter Island, some miles below, they had gained the necessary skill to negotiate the racing, tumbling Glues. Aside from the fact that he had ordered the engines of his father’s fast craft, the River Swallow, slowed down as they approached the place, and that his hands gripped the steering wheel more tightly, Ralph Stetson, only son of King Pin Stetson, the Railroad Magnate, felt no particular qualms as the whitecaps of the rollicking Glues appeared out of the darkness ahead.
The River Swallow was a narrow, sharp-stemmed motor boat which had more than once successfully defended her title of the fastest craft on the St. Lawrence. She was about sixty feet in length, painted a gleaming, lustrous black, with luxuriously fitted cabins and engines of the finest type obtainable, which drove her twin propellers at twelve hundred revolutions a minute. No wonder the boys, who, since their sojourn on the island, had become adepts at handling her, enjoyed their positions as captain and crew of the craft.
One of the two paid hands, who berthed forward, came up to Ralph just as the latter reached out for the simple mechanism which controlled the powerful search-light mounted near the steering wheel.