in full view of the dog.
Christmas was running up and down in front of the bicycle. He would face in a certain direction and pose and bark. He even ran up to his master as Frank approached, and seizing his coat in his teeth gently but resolutely pulled him in the direction he had pointed.
“He means something by all this,” declared Frank. “Go ahead,” he ordered.
Christmas, thus advised, bounded forward among some big trees. Frank, coming up with him after a jaunt of about three hundred feet, found him squatted on his haunches under a giant oak tree, looking up among its branches. Frank looked up, too. A moving object attracted his attention.
“Why,” said Frank, staring fixedly, “it’s a balloon.”
This he discerned beyond question. He could plainly make out its slack rigging. An ungainly, half-distended gas bag was wobbling about in the topmost branches of the tree. Lower down, turned sideways and partly smashed in, was a big wicker basket.
“It must be the balloon that little ragged fellow told about, the same one that I saw when I took that header from the bicycle,” decided Frank. “There couldn’t have been any one in it. Oh, say – but there was, Mercy!” and Frank gave a violent start and quick gasp. He stood transfixed with a sudden thrilling emotion akin to terror.
His eye sweeping the tree expanse keenly, he now made out, lying across two limbs about thirty feet from the ground, a human figure.
This form was motionless, and bent the branches considerably. As the breeze stirred them, they rocked like a cradle.
Frank guessed out the situation instantly. The balloon had driven or dropped into the tree top, shattering the cage and tipping out its pilot.
The latter had sustained a twenty-foot fall, striking some big branches with enough force to stun him. He had landed on his present frail perch. Frank’s heart almost stood still as he realized that a single waking moment, a treacherous shifting of the wind, might precipitate the imperilled balloonist to the ground with a broken neck.
Frank’s nerves were on a hard strain, but he grew composed as he decided what he would do. He motioned the dog to silence, and at once started to climb the tree.
He kept his eye on the swaying figure overhead all the time. At length Frank reached a big crotched branch shooting out from the main trunk not four feet under that which sustained the unconscious balloonist.
Frank braced his feet across the crotch. He took a great, long breath of relief and satisfaction, for he found himself now so situated that if the man should stir or slip from his insecure resting place, he could retard his fall.
Frank had, upon leaving home, placed a long coil of rope in his coat pocket. This he intended to use to tie up the bicycle in case he found it necessary to take it home to repair it. He now used this to form a criss-cross sort of a hammock directly under the two branches supporting the balloonist.
“There,” said Frank finally, feeling he had the man in right shape at last. “If he drops, that contrivance will hold him like a net.”
The youth rested for a few minutes, for it had been no easy task to slip the rope around the two branches and secure it stoutly. When he again stood up, he moved along his footing so that his face was on a level with the strange bed of the balloonist.
The latter lay sunk down among bending twigs like a person in a hammock. His face was bloodless, and over one temple was a great lump. That was probably where a heavy branch had struck and stunned him.
The stranger was fairly well-dressed, and he had intelligent features. For all this, however, there was a careless, easy-going look about him. He did not at all suggest to Frank the quick-witted, nerve-strained typical aeronaut.
Frank made his footing very sure, braced firmly, and with one hand took a stout grasp under the sleeper’s collar.
“Wake up – wake up,” he called directly in his ear.
The man stirred faintly, only. Frank continued to call out to him. He also with his other hand slapped his chest, his cheeks, his outstretched palms.
Finally with a deep groan the man opened his eyes wide suddenly. He stared and mumbled and tried to start up, but Frank held him flat.
“Easy, mister, now,” warned Frank gently. “Take time to find out the fix you are in. Then let me help you to the ground.”
“Help me – why, ginger! I understand,” exclaimed the balloonist.
He lay back weakly, staring at Frank, then all about him, and finally up at the gas bag flopping about in the upper branches of the tree top.
“I remember now,” he went on in a drawling, reminiscent tone. “It was a quick drop. Valve blew out. A regular smash when we landed. She’s a wreck, isn’t she? And say,” and the man glancing sideways downward shuddered, “if I had gone the full header it would have been all day with me, eh?”
Frank nodded. Briefly he explained how he had come to discover the refugee’s plight. He helped the man to sit up, guiding and assisting him. The latter came slowly out of his maze of bewilderment, and looked grateful.
“You’ve saved me, I guess,” he observed. “One move or slip, and I’d have gone shooting down the rest of the way.”
“When you are ready, let me help you to the ground,” suggested Frank.
“Oh, I’m all right now. Just a little shaking up,” assured the man. “No, no, don’t you worry. I’m at home among trapezes.”
The balloonist extricated himself successfully from the swaying branches and poised in a crotch nearer to the main trunk of the tree.
“Just a minute,” he said, deftly going up the tree, clambering over the shattered basket and reaching up.
There was a great hiss and a dense taint of escaping gas in the air as he operated some valve in the mechanism of the balloon. The gas bag dropped gracefully to a mass of silken and rubber folds.
Then the man started to descend, Frank preceding him. Both reached the ground in safety. The balloonist took an approving look at Frank, patted Christmas and began arranging his disordered attire.
“What are you going to do next?” asked Frank, after his companion had walked around the tree two or three times, viewing its top speculatively the while, and whistling softly to himself.
“Well, the bag is safe for a time. I guess I’d better get to the nearest town and telegraph the boss. It will be a job getting the balloon out of that fix without further damage.”
“If you will rest a bit till I fix up a broken bicycle I have over yonder, I will pilot you to Greenville,” said Frank.
“Good for you,” commended the man, and he followed Frank to the spot where the wheel lay.
Frank set at work on the damaged bicycle. He now had the necessary tools and material at hand to fix it up. At the end of ten minutes he had the wheel in safe shape to roll it home, where he could repair it more permanently.
Meantime his companion rattled on volubly. He told Frank his name was Park Gregson. He was a sort of a “knockaround.” He had been with a circus, had fought Indians, had been major in the South African War, had circumnavigated the globe twice, in fact, a Jack-of-all-trades and master
