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 arm.
"Tommy Dermott," I said, when I had got my nerves back somewhat. "Tommy
Dermott, I'm going to lay you across my knee and give you the greatest
thrashing a boy ever got in the world's history."
"No, you don't," he answered, squirming around. "You said you wouldn't
if I held on tight."
"That's all right," I said, "but I'm going to, just the same. The
fellows who go up in balloons are bad, unprincipled men, and I'm going
to give you a lesson right now to make you stay away from them, and from
balloons, too."
And then I gave it to him, and if it wasn't the greatest thrashing in
the world, it was the greatest he ever got.
But it took all the grit out of me, left me nerve-broken, that
experience. I canceled the engagement with the street railway company,
and later on went in for gas. Gas is much the safer, anyway.