"I thought the whole top of the tower had blown off," said Jimmy with a shiver. "It doesn't sound half so loud down in the yard."
"And good reason for that, for we are up here about forty feet, and it isn't cold or anything, either! Hello, I'm up against the roof! No, it's the trap door."
"Want any help?" said Jimmy just below Frank's heels.
"No; I'm pushing it up with my head. Wow! What was that?" as there came a scratching and clawing from just above him. "Oh, my, I do believe it was Pandora, herself. She must have been sitting on that trap door. Poor thing! She must have thought it was an earthquake. Come on, I'm through," said Frank in a whisper—although why he whispered he could not have told himself, for there was none to hear him in that high belfry excepting the cat and the bell. Jimmy struggled through the small hole in the floor and stood alongside Frank at last in the belfry. Just in front of them swung the big bell which tolled out the hours of the day and night. Through the slender open arches the boys could see, dimly outlined, the School buildings, with here and there a twinkling light in the dormitories, and farther off the lights in the houses of the village. It was bitter cold.
"Well, here we are," said Jimmy, "at last."
"And where's our cat?" said Frank.
"It's a little like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack to find a black cat in a blacker belfry. I hope you are satisfied now that it was a wild goose chase," grumbled Jimmy, when they had searched with foot and hand in all possible places of the narrow space.
"A wild cat chase, maybe," said Frank chuckling. "Pussy, pussy, poor old pussy, where are you? There she is, or I'm a flatfish," cried Frank. "Look—over your head!"
Jimmy looked, and there, ten feet over his head, in the upper tower and above the beams which supported the bell mechanism, he saw two fiery eyes gleaming.
"It's awful to see those two balls of yellow fire and nothing else visible," said Jimmy. "It's uncanny. Now, what are we going to do?"