Suddenly, amid the stillness that seemed to settle over the crowd, as they watched the lineman reach far over to make a distant connection, there sounded a cry of fear and pain. High up in the air there was a flash of bluish fire, a sizzling, as of red-hot iron plunged into water, and then a shower of sparks.
“The lineman! The lineman!” screamed several. “He’s on a live wire!”
Pausing in their efforts to get out of the crowd, and take up the pursuit, Bart and Fenn saw the lineman leaning over in a dangerous position. He was in a net-work of wires, and all about him seemed to be long, forked tongues of blue flame, while vicious sparks shot from one wire to the other. The unfortunate man had caught hold of the outer end of a cross-arm on the pole, and, while his feet were on one lower down, he was thus held in this strained position. Around his waist was a leather belt, passed about the pole, and this also retained him in position.
His cry of alarm had brought several other linemen to the foot of the pole.
“Are you shocked, George?” called one, anxiously.
“No,” came the faint reply, “not yet, but something has gone wrong. One of the wires has broken, and has charged all the others. I’m safe as long as I lean over this way, but I can’t get back, and I can’t get down.”
“Unhook your belt and slide down,” suggested one.
“I can’t. If I let go with my hands I’ll come up against the wires carrying the main current, and, if I do——” he did not finish, but they all knew what he meant.
The crowd was horror-struck. The man was in the midst of death. He could not move to come down, for fear of coming in contact with wires, which, though previously harmless, were now dangerous because the broken conductor, carrying a heavy charge, had fallen over them, making them deadly.