"Father is here," thought Tom, "or that would have been left out to gape at."
But it was not his father who was standing by the tarpauling. It was Bishop Hegan, who looked up at Tom as he would have hurried by, and beckoned to him. "Find Joan and the children," he said. "They outstripped me, and are here somewhere. Take them home. I must stay here by this poor thing. They say his wife is coming."
Bishop Hegan's face was white with pity. He took a step to the open building, and pointed up significantly. Tom lifted his eyes, and then ran forward where the crowd surged inside.
There had been three men working on the girders; now there were but two, still hanging, no one knew how, astride the great iron ribs sixty feet above the terrified eyes that watched them. They were both unconscious, as was yet another poor fellow who had tried to climb to his comrades' aid, and almost reached them, but turned back just in time, gasping and fainting. Half-way down the wall he was with difficulty rescued and lowered to safety. No one else was volunteering for the dangerous task. To climb those high sheer walls, mounting from ladder to brace, from brace to bracket, was no easy task at best for the coolest heads. The danger doubled when one climbed with nerves unhinged. Outside the building there were scaffoldings in place against the unfinished walls, but the braces on the steep roof had been removed, and to reach the unconscious men from there meant working unstayed on the verge of a precipice, and delving a way through iron plates. There seemed no choice but waiting in sickening suspense for a second tragedy, to be followed by a third.
Under the open windows and along the wall of the house Mr. Hegan was pacing up and down with an excitement which his son had never before seen. His men left a way for him, and watched him with a rude affection. Stern as he was, the safety of his men was dear to him, as they knew. He had vainly striven to raise a rescuing party, but the men hung back, he saw, in earnest. His helplessness seemed to hurt bodily.
"If I were only twenty years younger!" he was groaning as he walked.
"I am that, father. What shall I do?"
Mr. Hegan started and stood still, looking at his son in the first flush of his young manhood. He settled back against the window-frame with a deep breath.
"No," he said, hoarsely, uttering perhaps the first untruth of his manly life. "Any attempt is useless. It is throwing life away. I absolutely forbid it."
As if with a flash of memory, Tom's mind went back to that scene a year before, of which this seemed a repetition. Then, on this same historic July day, he had, with a curious appropriateness, made to his father his declaration of independence, but had met an inappropriate defeat. Then, too, they had stood, as now, by an open window, and, moved by an instinct of repetition, Tom turned to stand exactly as he had before stood, leaning against the opposite side of the frame. As he did so, he saw with what he knew was a foolish but uncontrollable flush of exultation that his eyes were on an exact level with his father's. One ambition he had achieved, but along with this growth had come another so much more important that Tom forgot all else in the exhilaration of its discovered possession.