Page:Baseball Joe on the School Nine.djvu/169

Rh one. He moved still nearer to the edge of the tower.

"Don't jump! Don't!" yelled the crowd. "You'll be killed!"

"He might just as well be killed by the fall as burned to death," remarked one man grimly. "In fact I'd prefer it."

"Can't someone do something?" begged a woman hysterically.

The man held out his hands appealingly.

"Oh, if we only had an airship, we could rescue him!" murmured Tom.

"By Jove!" exclaimed Joe. "I have an idea. If I could only get a rope up to him he could slide down it, if we held the outer end away from the fire—a slanting cable you know."

"That's it!" yelled his chum.

"How are you going to get a rope up to him?" asked Luke Fodick, who was standing beside our hero. "No one could throw a rope up there."

"No, perhaps not a rope," admitted Joe, "but if I could throw a string we could tie the rope to the string and he could haul it up and fasten it."

"But you can't even throw a string up there," insisted Luke.

"Of course not!" added Hiram, who had joined his crony. "Nobody could."