river all right, and he had gone through Devil's Cave without flinching. But you could conquer your fear of water. You could conquer your fear of darkness—
Height was something different.
He shinnied a little higher on the trunk, gazed yearningly up to the last fork, where the highest limb began its graceful journey into the summer sky. He heard the taunts of the other boys from the meadow below. They did not think he could make it. In a way, they didn't want him to make it. If he made it, they wouldn't have anyone to pick on till another new boy moved to town.
Well, he'd show them!
He shinnied furiously for several seconds, then paused again. He was tired, and his chest hurt. His shins smarted from repeated scraping against the trunk.
He looked up at the fork again. It was quite close now, perhaps close enough. He reached up with one arm, managed to wrap it around the larger of the two limbs. After a moment he reinforced his hold with his other arm. He started to pull his body upward, shinnying with his legs. For a while he thought he was going to make it, then his left arm cramped and his right, unable to support his weight, began to slip.
He screamed as he started to fall, but in his desperation he managed to transfer his good arm back to the trunk and keep his legs in position, so that he didn't really fall, he slid, instead, down the trunk to the limb he had left a short time before. He glimpsed the ground, far below, and the height caught up to him once and for all, and he locked his body around the limb and clung there, whimpering.
Presently, he saw one of the other boys start climbing the tree to bring him down, and he heard his new nickname being bandied about on the meadow—
"Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!"
"Gee, Dad, are you going on another trip?"
"Sure thing," her father said, looking up from his open suitcase.
"But—but you just got back."
His face looked funny, the way it always did after he and mother had been mouth-fighting—as though he wanted it to look one way and his muscles wanted it to look a totally different way, and he had had to settle for an expression
