Dave explained, making it as light for Ferd as possible.
“Well! I’ve been expecting something like this ever since the mill was put up. We can’t do anything about it now. But I believe the wind will shift soon. And if it does, perhaps I can stop the sails from outside here.”
It was nearly dark, however, and quite supper-time, before the farmer’s prophecy came true. Then the rain suddenly ceased to fall (the thunder and lightning had long since rolled away into the distance) and the wind dropped.
The farmer and his man rigged a brake to fall against the narrow breadth of shaft which extended outside of the mill wall, and so brought pressure to bear upon the revolving axle. This helped bring the sails to a stop.
How thankfully the Go-Aheads and the Busters got out of that tower, it would be difficult to express. Professor Skillings had started up through the rain to see what he could do; but on the way he had picked up a white pebble washed out of the roadside by the rain, and there being something peculiar about it, he stopped under a hedge to examine it by the light of his pocket lamp. Then he must needs proceed with his ever-present geological hammer to break the stone in two. Long after dark his electric lamp was flashing down there on the hillside like some huge wavering firefly.
Not that he could have done a thing to help his young friends. Mrs. Prosser, the farmer’s wife, had the most practical idea of anybody; for, the minute the boys and girls were out of the mill, she insisted that they troop into the farmhouse kitchen and there sit down to her long table and “get outside of” great bowls of milk and bread, with a host of ginger cookies on the side.
So the incident ended happily after all, though Ferdinand Roberts’s spirits drooped for several days. It was well for him to suffer in spirit–as Frankie said: it might teach him a lesson. And he had to pay the farmer for the damage he had done to the machinery.
Ferdinand never had any money. He spent his allowance in advance, borrowing of the other Busters whenever he could. When he got money from home he had to sit down and apportion it all out to his creditors, and then had to begin borrowing again.
He had hard work scraping together the wherewithal to pay Mr. Prosser; but the boys made it up for him, and the girls would have helped–only Dave Shepard had instilled it into Ferd’s mind that it was not honorable to borrow from a girl.
However, having cleaned his own pocket and strained his credit to the snapping point, Ferdinand was over at the Forge with Tubby a couple of days afterward and beheld something in a store window that he thought he wanted.