smashing him into the bag once
quite severely. His lip began to tremble at this, and he was crying
again. I tried to joke and laugh, but it was no use. His pluck was
oozing out, and at any moment I was prepared to see him go shooting
past me.

I was in despair. Then, suddenly, I remembered how one fright could
destroy another fright, and I frowned up at him and shouted sternly:

"You just hold on to that rope! If you don't I'll thrash you within an
inch of your life when I get you down on the ground! Understand?"

"Ye-ye-yes, sir," he whimpered, and I saw that the thing had worked. I
was nearer to him than the earth, and he was more afraid of me than of
falling.

"'Why, you've got a snap up there on that soft bag," I rattled on.

"Yes," I assured him, "this bar down here is hard and narrow, and it
hurts to sit on it."

Then a thought struck him, and he forgot all about his aching fingers.

"When are you going to jump?" he asked. "That's what I came up to see."

I was sorry to disappoint him, but I wasn't going to make any jump.

But he objected to that. "It said so in the papers," he said.

"I don't care," I answered. "I'm feeling sort of lazy today, and I'm
just going to ride down the balloon. It's my balloon and I guess I can
do as I please about it. And, anyway, we're almost down now."

And we were, too, and sinking fast. And right there and then that
youngster began to argue with me as to whether it was right for me to
disappoint the people, and to urge their claims upon me. And it was
with a happy heart that I held up my end of it, justifying myself in a
thousand different ways, till we shot over a grove of eucalyptus trees
and dipped to meet the earth.

"Hold on tight!" I shouted, swinging down from the trapeze by my hands
in order to make a landing on my feet.

We skimmed past a barn, missed a mesh of clothesline, frightened
the barnyard chickens into a panic, and rose up again clear over a
haystack--all this almost quicker than it takes to tell. Then we came
down in an orchard, and when my feet had touched the ground I fetched up
the balloon by a couple of turns of the trapeze around an apple tree.

I have had my balloon catch fire in mid air, I have hung on the cornice
of a ten-story house, I have dropped like a bullet for six hundred feet
when a parachute was slow in opening; but never have I felt so weak and
faint and sick as when I staggered toward the unscratched boy and
gripped him by the a