"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."
He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows and waited, flat against the wall.
Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods, caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then. Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition rubbering out of the next window."
The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room, had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well, sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."
The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the window, then heard, in _sotto voce_, "I can't see him." Loudly again, the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer faction."
Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He remembered that there was pavement below him. But he did not think about giving himself up.