This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it tightened.
“We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy.
“Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring suspended upside down, just out of reach.
“We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”
“And leave this boy to be squeezed to death? I never saw a Mayo around Foxboro yet that wasn’t a fool!” Mrs. Forge wrung her hands. “Oh, oh, oh! Somebody’s got to climb that tree and cut this boy down and do it quickly, or he’ll die o’ pinched vitals! Oh! oh! oh!”
“But if he’s cut down sudden, he’ll land on his head and break his neck,” groaned Mrs. Harper. “Why on earth should they hang him upside down?”
Nat’s unpremeditated inversion had complicated matters. And all this time the spy was kicking and struggling and bellowing until it was a mystery why he wasn’t heard down in the business part of the town. Moreover, the prospects were that if he were left there much longer, any attempts to cut him down would be superfluous; he was coming down himself—in halves!
But the Providence that looks after children, drunken men and fools was proverbially kind that afternoon. It sent old Amos Winch riding past atop a load of oats. Amos took note of a kicking, shrieking boy suspended from an apple bough above a group of distraught women and children and came down through that orchard in jumps. As he ran, he unclasped a big pocketknife. Out on the limb, he wound a taut rope twice about his mighty hand. Then he hacked and cut above it. Hand over hand he hauled the little Forge boy up, caught him firmly by the collar and straightened him out.
Immediately that he was down and manifestly unhurt, Mrs. Forge walked over to a lower apple bough and pulled off a “sucker.” She stripped the switch clean of leaves and grasped her youngster firmly by the collar.
“But Ma!—I didn’t mean to do it! Please, Ma, don’t whip me. I didn’t mean to do it!”