It needed all Dale's persuasion and plentiful supply of hopeful suppositions (partly derived from his talk with Durend, but mostly made up out of his own head) to keep the Benson crew from breaking out into open revolt. Every day they had finished the race half fresh, and not one of them could see the use of parading up and down the course as though uncertain whether they were in the race or not. And through it all Mr. Benson just looked grimly on, indifferent, apparently, to all their woes, and said no word save a little--a very little--commendation, no doubt intended to keep them from entering the very last stages of despair. It seemed as though he had given the whole thing up as a bad job, and did not intend to interest himself further in the matter. Another day came just like the last, and listlessly the dispirited crew turned their oars on the feather and waited for the signal to start. Quite suddenly they woke up to the fact that Stroke was leaning back towards them and speaking. "Now, you fellows," he was saying in a quiet but tense voice, "I am going to give you a racing start at last. See to it, then, that you pick it up and keep it. Don't forget. Franklin, I rely upon you to do your utmost to keep up with us. Now, boys!" "Boom!" There was scarcely a soul about to see Benson's start; nearly everyone was watching the struggles going on ahead, where strong crews were striving in the last days to secure and hold a higher position for the Houses they had been called to represent. So it was that the Benson start passed unnoticed until it dawned upon Colson's, the crew ahead, that the Benson boat had drawn unaccountably nearer. And Benson's, too! It could only be a fluke, and with that conviction Colson's settled down grimly to the task of shaking them off. But somehow or other it did not seem at all easy to shake them off. In fact, to their dismay, the end of the great spurt saw the gap between the boats no wider. Suddenly, too, Benson's spurted in their turn, and the nose of their boat drew closer at a speed that wellnigh paralysed Colson's. Indeed, in the Benson boat, the pent-up energies of three days of enforced self-restraint were being let loose in a series of desperate spurts for the mastery. Even Durend could contain himself no longer, and Franklin, though he had not yet reached anything like the form of the rest of the crew, was yet able to do his part in the struggle with a fair measure of success. Within five minutes of the start Benson's had overlapped Colson's, and, almost immediately after, the bump came.