"There's something caught in that tree!" he said.
In another minute the kite wire could be seen. It had hooked its coils into a bale of barbed wire, and in trying to lift this had entangled the bale in the branches.
As though he were starting for a hundred yard dash, Monroe sped ahead. Grimly, Bob tried to catch up to him, but it was like a bull-dog chasing a deer. Tom, his face in the tense grin of exhaustion, struggled bravely, but dropped behind step by step.
Monroe was within fifty feet of the tree when a sudden thought struck him. He slowed down, and as Bob caught up to him, said in a low voice:
"Tom's made a great run! Let him be the first to get there."
Bob nodded.
As the pace slowed down, Tom, his gait a little staggering, caught up with the other two and passed them. He reached the tree first and looked up.
"My kites!" he cried. "And I got the amateur record!" and he collapsed on the ground at the foot of the tree, worn out but supremely happy.
With the approach of winter, kite-flying became less popular as a sport, but two or three times a month Tom sent up one of his kites with the meteorograph, and the observations were faithfully forwarded to Osborne, whose original gift of the two kites had been the stimulus to the Mississippi League of the Weather.
The first few flakes of snow turned the attention of the boys to an entirely new line of weather observations. Many and many a time had the boys noticed the strange shapes of snow-flakes, but without paying much attention to them. On the first Saturday after the light snow-fall, however, three different boys brought in rough drawings of star-like and feather-like snow forms that they had noticed.