Even at the distance where I stood I saw George start and a shiver pass over his body.  He looked wildly about him.

“To me! to me!” I shouted.

He fixed his eye on mine and steadied himself.  There was a terrible silent excitement in the people, in the very air.

There was the mistake.  We should have stopped then, shaken as he was, but South, bewildered and terrified, lost control of himself:  he gave the word.

I held the rope loose—­held George with my eyes—­One!

I saw his lips move:  he was counting with me.

Two!

His eye wandered, turned to the stage-box.

Three!

Like a flash, I saw the white upturned faces below me, the posture-girls’ gestures of horror, the dark springing figure through the air, that wavered—­and fell a shapeless mass on the floor.

There was a moment of deathlike silence, and then a wild outcry—­women fainting, men cursing and crying out in that senseless, helpless way they have when there is sudden danger.  By the time I had reached the floor they had straightened out his shattered limbs, and two or three doctors were fighting their way through the great crowd that was surging about him.

Well, sir, at that minute what did I hear but George’s voice above all the rest, choked and hollow as it was, like a man calling out of the grave:  “The women!  Good God! don’t you see the women?” he gasped.

Looking up then, I saw those miserable Slingsbys hanging on to the trapeze for life.  What with the scare and shock, they’d lost what little sense they had, and there they hung helpless as limp rags high over our heads.

“Damn the Slingsbys!” said I. God forgive me!  But I saw this battered wreck at my feet that had been George.  Nobody seemed to have any mind left.  Even South stared stupidly up at them and then back at George.  The doctors were making ready to lift him, and half of the crowd were gaping in horror, and the rest yelling for ladders or ropes, and scrambling over each other, and there hung the poor flimsy wretches, their eyes starting out of their heads from horror, and their lean fingers loosing their hold every minute.  But, sir—­I couldn’t help it—­I turned from them to watch George as the doctors lifted him.

“It’s hardly worth while,” whispered one.

But they raised him and, sir—­the body went one way and the legs another.

I thought he was dead.  I couldn’t see that he breathed, when he opened his eyes and looked up for the Slingsbys.  “Put me down,” he said, and the doctors obeyed him.  There was that in his voice that they had to obey him, though it wasn’t but a whisper.

“Ladders are of no use,” he said.  “Loper!”

“Yes, George”

“You can swing yourself up.  Do it.”

I went.  I remember the queer stunned feeling I had:  my joints moved like a machine.

When I had reached the trapeze, he said, as cool as if he were calling the figures for a Virginia reel, “Support them, you—­Loper.  Now, lower the trapeze, men—­carefully!”