Frank Armstrong, Drop Kicker

by Matthew M. Colton

"So this is where our friends, the birds, get in," he said. "The question is, can I get out?"

He stuck his head through the opening and looked down. Below there was nothing but blackness. "I don't dare risk it. I might break my neck in a cellarway if I dropped." He drew in his head, refreshed by the breath of free night air, and continued his search. Stumbling through the gloom of the upper hall, his hand came in contact with a ladder. He gave it a jerk, but it was nailed securely to the floor. "The attic!" he exclaimed aloud; "if there's a skylight and I can get out on the roof perhaps I can make some one hear."

Up the ladder he went. If it was black below, it was still blacker where he was now penetrating, for not even a ray of moonlight entered. The air was close and stifling, and in the attic of the old house, where he found himself in a few moments, he could scarcely breathe. His entrance there disturbed some night birds that had taken possession of the place, and they flew about uttering angry cries and dashing so close to him that he could feel the fanning of air from their wings. With his arm across his face, he felt for a ladder which must lead to the skylight, if indeed there was a skylight in the roof above. After traversing half the length of the house and colliding with the corner of the chimney, his hand touched wood. It was another ladder, and his heart jumped with joy at the touch. The rounds were covered with a thick layer of dust, deposited there through many years of disuse. Up its short length Frank went cautiously till his head touched the roof. He felt around carefully till his hand touched a hasp. With a sudden jerk he pulled it aside and with his head pressing against the skylight, bored upward. To his great joy the heavy skylight moved and swung up on its rusty hinges, and in another moment he was out on the roof of the house with the stars above his head.

What a relief it was to be out of that dismal house! The horrors of it lay below him, but was he any better off? Could he make any one hear him, and, if they did hear him, would any one be likely to come to such a place? Wasn't he in as bad a fix as before? These questions jumped into his brain in rapid succession.

"Help! Help!" Frank raised his voice and shouted. Again and again he shouted, but there was no answering hail. Off to the left he could plainly see the lights of Queen's School. As a bird flies, it was not more than half a mile from his perch to the Library where his friends were holding their meeting and no doubt wondering where he was. What were they thinking of him? He began hitching along on the roof toward the front of the house, his intention being to attempt a descent, hand over hand, along the roof's edge to the eaves, where, if he could see the ground, he might risk a drop.

Hitching along laboriously, Frank encountered an obstruction when he was halfway to the end of his journey. He felt of it. It was an insulator, and stretching away from it on both sides was a wire of small diameter. "Telephone," said Frank to himself. "How I wish I had an instrument." He climbed over it and went on. Suddenly he stopped: "By Jove, I wonder if that is our wire to Queen's Station? It certainly comes down this way." He was thinking hard.

"It is the wire!" he shouted joyfully. "I remember now Murphy said he put an insulator on this old house because there were no trees near to take the span."

Instantly he turned back to the wire. On one side of the insulator the wire was stretched tightly, but the other side hung sagging. He reached out and pulled on the slack side and found that he could draw it up a foot or more.

"Just the thing!" he exclaimed joyfully. "Now we'll see what happens!"

Straddling the roof, Frank again took hold of the slack loop of the wire and pulled with all his strength. When he had hauled it as tight as possible, he reached down and put a coil around his foot, and was overjoyed to find that he could hold the wire in position that way, although the strain almost pulled him apart. Then, taking his knife, he began to saw at the wire. When he had made a little notch in it he worked it back and forth, bending it this way and that, and suddenly it fell apart.