“If another car comes—” Florence came near to wishing she had stuck to her resolve and made it a night of pure pleasure.
No car came from the other side. A quick-witted guard had stopped it in the nick of time, by a phone call.
So the little yellow man in a long yellow jacket with a three-bladed knife in his belt balanced himself with his yellow umbrella and proceeded blithely on his way while an ever increasing sea of faces gazed upward.
Great searchlights began playing upon him. Like fingers they pointed him out. Ten thousand, twenty, fifty, perhaps seventy thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.
Not one of all these people, save Florence, knew what it was all about. “Is this one more feature, a grand surprise in this the grandest of all shows?” This is what the thousands were asking.
Other questions occupied Florence’s mind. What did the man mean to do? Did he know himself? How was it all to end?
The suspense continued. It is well that it did. The first few hundred feet of this curious person’s sky walk was over the solid earth. Beneath him was the gasping multitude. Jammed together in one solid mass, not one of them could have moved had this sky walker come hurtling down from those dizzy heights.
He did not fall. Instead, with all the grace of a fine lady out for a promenade, he moved along the cables that, being all but invisible in the night, made him seem to walk on air.
“If he were only over water!” Florence spoke without meaning to do so. “Then there would be some chance.”
“At two hundred feet?” some one doubted.