He expected a pretty sight, but Joan's climbing was something more than that. She not only swayed from branch to branch, but fitted her slender body against limbs too large to grasp, crawling out on their limits as the tree-toad crawls. For the pure joy of motion, she worked her sinuous way to the tree-top, where no cherries grew, and back again to the limbs where they hung in clusters, which she flung down, laughing. It was not the fearless climbing of a hardy boy, but the poetry of climbing as a delicate girl might be expected to climb, but as the on-looker had never seen one venture to attempt. He felt that in a way it was scarcely human, and was glad when Joan, flushed but not breathless, dropped again at his side.
"Thank you," said the Bishop, as if he had witnessed a special benefit performance. He kept watching the young girl as she walked home quietly by his side.
"Aunt Milly!" he thought. "Fancy this bit of oddity shackled in her house! But she climbs entirely too well. Egad! it's a professional wood-nymph. She must have a governess. I wonder if she is all heroics, or if we have a mute inglorious Jeanne d'Arc in our midst. I almost wish we could prove the child."
"Come, children," said Joan, interrupting the thread of her uncle's thought. "Come, stir your little stumps. We are late for lunch, and I'm hungry. No, Lolly, it won't hurt Ted to run a little. You know, nothing ever hurts our boys. I declare, rattlesnakes run from 'em."
"She's just a little child, after all," decided the laughing Bishop, "Upon my word, I think I caught her heroics for the moment."
"Come on," said Joan, urging on the little ones. "Come on. Father must be at home by now."
She stopped short, suddenly listening, her eyes dilated. Across the fields, blown to them on the wind, came faintly the sound of a sharp shrill whistle, thrice repeated, then silence, and the same signal again.
"It's for father," said Joan, breathlessly. "Something has happened at the works."
All over the great iron-works men were hurriedly calling inquiries to one another as the shrill insistent whistle rang out with that note of alarm which danger signals seem to gain, or which the ear hears in them. The busy place roused as a humming beehive is roused by a sounded gong. All those who could, or who dared to leave their work, ran in the direction where they saw others running. Tom, dressed in his rough overalls, and with face and hands grimy from the great furnace stoves for which he was responsible, was by that responsibility tied to his post until he could leave everything in safe order. He was almost the last man free, and not until long after his patience was exhausted was he able to follow the straggling procession that led to the new fire-proof stock-house in process of erection. As he ran, Tom learned by snatches what had happened. Those dreaded poisonous gases that are the curse of the furnace-man had been insidiously leaking out from the neighboring furnace pipes, and creeping up under the iron roof of the stock-house. There they had collected as in an ether-cone, waiting to do their mischievous work. So slowly and so imperceptibly had they gathered, the men working in under the roof, riveting the huge iron girders, had labored on unconscious of the enemy surrounding them. They were not "iron-men" proper, and so less inured to the gases and less aware of their danger, the peculiarity of which is that the gases do their deadly work so swiftly when once taking hold that a man is unconscious before he knows he is actually attacked. Tom remembered one poor fellow who was sitting on a high wall eating his poor dinner-pail meal, when the gases found and caught him. It was Tom who had discovered him lying at the foot of the wall, a bit of bread still in his hand, and—Tom did not care to remember the rest, and he was glad when he reached the stock-house to see that a piece of tarpauling had been laid over a huddled something on the ground outside the house.