"Now, throw him!" called Harry. "Stiffen out and chuck him back to Tom. Now!"
Alas! I made a bungle of it. I could not give him send enough, and the boy, falling short of Tom's arms, dangled from the "mechanic" lines half-way down to the net. It was quite plain that more than good intentions are needed to chuck young gentlemen through flights of eighteen feet. I was feeling decidedly queer by this time—a sort of half-way-over-the-Channel faintness, and could imagine what it must be to work up here, right at the peak of a "big-top" tent, under the scorch of an August sun, with the stifle of a great audience coming up from below. I expressed a readiness to descend.
"Try a drop into the net," suggested Tom Potter. "See, hang by your hands, like this. Keep your legs together and lift 'em out stiff. Then—"
Down he went, and landed easily on his shoulders.
"Better put the 'mechanic' on him," said Harry, and presently young Roy was beside me on the cradle, securing me to the drop-lines with a double hitch.
"You want to be sure to lift yer legs," he remarked. "I knew a feller that struck the net straight on his feet and broke his knees."
"Don't you worry," said Harry; "if you don't fall right, I'll hold you with the 'mechanic.'"
Of course, when a man has started at this sort of thing he must see it through, so I hung obediently by my hands, lifted my legs, and—
"Now," cried Harry, and instantly, before I had time to think or note sensations, I was on my back in the net. And I understood what a terrible problem it is for a gymnast, falling with such swiftness, to turn two or three somersaults in the air and land with the body at just the angle of safety, for a shade too much one way may mean a broken leg, and a shade too much the other way an injured spine.
For some time after my aërial experience I sat around rather limp and white, giving but indifferent attention to the breaking in of young Clarence Potter, baby of the family, now in his first fortnight's practising. He certainly showed a game spirit, this little fellow. When his father said, "Jump," he jumped, and when the call came for a forward somersault across and a half turn he went at it like a veteran, though his wrists must have burned with red chafes where they caught him. Of course he had the 'mechanic' on all the time.