“Who is that up there?” the principal asked sternly.
“Wayne Gordon, sir,” answered a dozen voices.
“Gordon! Gordon!” The principal made a trumpet of his hands and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Come down at once!”
There was no answer from the figure on the crosstree. Possibly the wind was too strong to allow of the principal’s voice reaching him; possibly Wayne heard, but thought the command issued from one of the fellows. At all events his only response was to seize the slender topmast with his arms, dig his climbing irons into the wood, and start upward. The principal again shouted.
“Best let him alone, sir,” said Professor Durkee calmly. “I doubt if he can hear; but if he can ’twill only bother him and make the task more hazardous.” The principal turned sternly to the throng about the pole.
“Did none of you know better than to let him do this? Is that you there, Cunningham? I should have thought that you, for one, would have stopped him!”
There was no reply from the throng, and Don accepted the rebuke with a miserable countenance. It was Paddy who ventured a defense.
“He would go, sir. Nobody can stop Gordon when he makes up his mind, sir.” The principal’s only answer was a gesture of exasperation. Then all eyes were turned upward again.
Wayne had reached a place where, because of the slenderness of the pole, his irons were of no further use. To take them off was a difficult task, but to keep them on rendered farther progress well-nigh impossible. So he drove the spike on his right foot deep into the mast and unbuckled his left iron and threw it far out beyond the edge of the crowd below. Clinging to the pole with his legs and his left arm, he managed at last to undo the remaining iron and kick his foot free from the straps. Then he wound both legs about the mast, gripped it firmly with his hands, and began to shin upward again. He wished that he had left his shoes at the crosstree, for his stockinged feet would have gripped the wood much closer. But it was too late to think of that. The wind and the exertion had almost deprived him of breath, and now, as he reached a point some twenty feet above the crosstree, the topmast began to get woefully slim and swayed sickeningly in the wind. For an instant he stopped climbing and clung motionless. To the watchers below it seemed that he must be about to give up. The mast looked scarcely larger round than one’s arm, and the boy’s figure, a dark atom against the sullen gray of the flying clouds, swayed from side to side perilously.