“Snappy work, Bill,” she applauded. “Who goes first? You or me?”
“This is a case where gentlemen take precedence. I’ll go first—and show you a little trick they teach midshipmen at Annapolis.”
He untied the knot which held the stone and bringing the ends together pulled the rope until the lengths on both sides of the trunk were even.
“So long,” he breezed, “see you anon!”
With a hand on either rope he swung himself upward, seemingly without effort. It was as though he were lifting a penny-weight rather than one hundred and seventy-five pounds of solid American bone and muscle. Then with a quick movement he twisted the slack ends about his thighs, and the girl was amazed to see him let go both hands and wave.
“It’s a way we have in the Navy,” he laughed. “Quite a comfortable seat—if you know how. Skirts are rather in the way, so I don’t advise you to try it. Although I must say in parting that you have already parted with the greater part of your skirt.”
Dorothy giggled. “What of it? There’s a perfectly good pair of bloomers underneath.” She was amused by his fooling, though she suspected he was trying to put heart into her.
Bill coughed. “Finicky persons of British extraction might claim that your last statement was a decided bloomer itself—but I digress—” he went on, in the manner of a barker at a side show. “Laydees and gen-tel-men—I wish to state that William Bolton, late tiddledywinks champion of the Nutmeg State, is about to give his famous impersonation of a monkey on a stick!”
His hands grasped the ropes above his head. Up came his body, the turns about his thighs providing an apparently comfortable seat or purchase, while his hands shot upward again. The speed with which he went through these movements was remarkable, the swiftness of his passage up the ropes only comparable to an East Indian running up a cocoanut palm. Before Dorothy could believe her eyes, he was sitting astride the tree trunk, hauling up the rope.
“That was marvelous!” she called up to him. “Some day you’ll have to show me how you do it.”