Eyes wide and face a little white, he tore across the road, splashing through puddles and slipping in the soft mud. Whirling around the corner into Pine Street, he saw a woman rush bareheaded out of a near-by house and two men come running down an adjacent alley. Rather, he noted them with that odd sense of observation which works intuitively, for his whole being was concentrated on the sight of that slight, boyish figure lying motionless in the roadway.
For a second Dale stared blankly, unable to understand. His first thought was that some human agency had done this thing, but almost as swiftly he realized that there was no one in sight who could have struck the child unconscious, nor had there been time for such an assailant to get away. Then, as he hurried closer through the gathering dusk, he caught sight of a trailing wire gripped convulsively in the small hands, and in a flash he realized the truth. In a flash, too, he realized that the body was not as motionless as he had supposed. A writhing, twisting movement, slight but ceaseless, quivered through the helpless victim, from his thin, black-stockinged legs to the blue lips. To the white-faced lad bending over him it seemed to tell of great suffering borne, perforce, in silence–and he was such a little kid!
From Dale’s own lips there burst a smothered, inarticulate cry. Every idea, save the vital need of tearing loose that killing grip, vanished from the older boy’s mind. Heedless of a warning shout from one of the men, he bent swiftly forward and caught the child by one shoulder.
What happened then Dale was never afterward able to describe clearly. It was as if some monstrous tingling force, greater, stranger than anything he had ever known, struck at him out of the air. In a twinkling it tore him from the boy on the ground and hurled him almost the width of the street. He crashed against the stone curbing and for a second or two lay there, dazed and blinking, then climbed painfully to his feet.
“I oughtn’t to have–touched him–with my bare hands,” he muttered uncertainly. “I must have got nearly the whole charge!”
He felt faint and sick and wobbly. From the horrified group gathered helplessly around the unconscious boy across the street, a woman’s hysterical cry beat on his brain with monotonous iteration: “What can we do? What can we do? It’s terrible! Oh, can’t you do something?”
“If we only had rubber gloves–” murmured one of the men, vaguely.
“Where’s a ’phone?” interrupted another. “I’m going to get ’em to shut off the current!”
“You can’t,” some one replied. People were constantly rushing up to gasp and exclaim, but do nothing. “The power-house is clear over at Medina. It’ll take too long to get the connection.”
“I’m going to try, anyhow,” was the sharp retort. “It’s better than doing nothing.”