For a full thirty seconds the boy clung there, unable to do anything but watch Starley shooting down into the awful depths below. He gave a gasp of relief as the parachute at last opened like an umbrella, and went sailing away earthward as gently as a feather.
Then he got out his knife. "Now for it," he muttered bravely.
By this time the balloon was nearly a mile above the earth, and the breeze had long ago carried it clear of the town. It was sailing over what looked to Clifford like a patchwork quilt of little fields and woods and farmsteads, with here and there the silver ribbon of a river.
The whole position was so amazing that Clifford found it sheerly impossible to believe that one brief half hour before he had been one of those ants that he now saw crawling at such an enormous depth beneath him.
Clinging here close to the side of the balloon envelope the boy felt safer. He had something more or less solid to hold on to. He was so interested and excited that for the moment he almost forgot about the knife.
It was the cold that brought him to himself again. Down below it had been a warm if breezy September afternoon. Up here Clifford, in thin summer clothes, was rapidly chilling to the bone. His fingers were already blue.
He looked at them blankly. "If I don't hurry up they'll be too stiff to use the knife," he said half aloud. He opened the knife with his teeth, and, taking a long breath, stabbed boldly at the silk.
The blade flashed through with a ripping sound, and gas gushed out in such volumes that Clifford, half suffocated, was forced to hastily abandon his position and clamber a little way round out of reach of the rush.
Learning by experience, he reached as high as he could stretch, and made a long, sideways gash, then dropped hastily back to the ring.
"That's done it!" he cried delightedly. For the cut was followed by a long, hissing tear. The envelope had split for several feet, and the lower part was rapidly crumpling like a burst bladder.