Free Sons of Fortune by Malcolm Macdonald

what torture that would be to my brother.”
    Out on the beam Boy was slowly but resolutely raising himself upright again. A book caught him across the nose with a flash of searing light and a salty, hollow sharpness in which his head rang. Two images of the hall spiralled over one another. But still he went on raising himself upright.
    When he made his first move back he discovered what all new boys who tried to go along the beam at the straddle discovered—he was going against the grain of the wood. A long splinter of pitch pine pierced the heel of his right hand, another his left thigh. He had no choice but to kneel or get turned into a pincushion of splinters. He began another painful move to the new position. The sweat now made him feel deathly chill.
    Everyone had been waiting for the discovery: they howled with laughter and pricked one another’s bodies with imaginary splinters. Boy searched for one kindlier face in all that unrelenting mob and found none. What he did find made him freeze halfway up into the crouch: Blenkinsop was unfastening the tethered end of the rope!
    Moments later the free end swung loose, a whippy pendulum, from the neighbouring beam. Boy was paralysed, one foot in the crouch, one still hanging down. He could not move; he could hardly breathe. His eyes bulged.
    Now the silence was complete. Blenkinsop looked around, grinning, ready to ward off a shower of laughing congratulation. He faced nothing but blank, horror-stricken silence. Boy realized that he had not been alone in depending on that rope; it had been every fellow’s licence to mock and jeer. But now, to a man, they sat-crouched-hung there with him, appalled at his danger, willing his muscles to move until their own ached.
    “You blithering fool, Blenkinsop!” Swift hissed in that straining silence. But there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to retrieve the loose end now. Boy had to make it back to the gallery alone.
    No one looked at either of the senior men; no one could take his eyes off Boy, still rigid in the middle of the beam.
    “Come on, Stevenson. You can do it!” someone said.
    “Yes, come on, man!” Several took up the shout.
    Boy opened his eyes then and saw smiling, fearful encouragement on every side. He saw, too, that someone in the hall below had dowsed the gaslights in the lower gallery and the main body of the hall. Only the upper gallery was lit. The height, the sickening, headwhirling height, had gone.
    This beam rests two feet above the floor, Boy told himself. Stand up!
    He stood. He could smile. He smiled at the silhouettes that thronged the rails, knowing they were smiling, too. One, two, three, four easy steps brought him to the safety of the upper stiffener, but now he did not pause. He swung himself around it and, thrusting an arm through the rose-shaped hole, made the easy leap for the railing, catching hold of it without difficulty. If the move had been made upon the ground, no one would have turned to watch; yet now a great roar of relief rang from every throat there. Boys clustered around to haul him in over the railing and slap him on the back. “Well done, man!” they cried.
    Over, Boy thought, close to tears. It’s over!
    “You’ll only get a light drumming-in after that,” Swift promised.
    “What?” Boy was incredulous. More? After that?
    Swift laughed, not quite wholeheartedly. “Oh yes. That”—he pointed airily at the beam—“was a fraud. No one escapes a drumming-in, however well they do the beam.”
    Several lads around giggled at the trick, but the mood was friendly.
    Only Blenkinsop looked peevish as he came forward to Boy.
    “Come on,” he said roughly. “Get that rope off. It’s time for your little bro.”
    “Let me do it again,” Boy said. “In place of him.”
    Swift shook his head. “Can’t be done, young sport.”
    Blenkinsop was very rough in getting the rope off. They swung the loose end over the beam, fished it in with one of the poles for opening