ACROSS THE RAINBOW
CHAPTER XII
ACROSS THE RAINBOW
“OH, IF I could only get over there!” moaned Billy. He had not stopped to think what he would do if he were there. His eagerness to help the Evening Star was so keen that he was almost ready to leap the abyss before him. He even went to the brink and tried to calculate his chances of getting across with a running jump, but he saw that the best jumper in the world could not have got half way over before he would have tumbled into the icy depths below. So, with a sigh, he sat down to think.
Billy did not mean to cry—he never meant to cry—but the sight of the Equator hovering so closely over the Evening Star and melting down the snow mountain like a wax taper brought an unbidden tear or two to his eyes, and they rolled slowly down his cheeks.
One of them fell on his stocking, where it quickly froze, and Billy, looking at it disconsolately, observed that it shone with the hues of the rainbow in the light thrown off by the Equator.