The Deacon Militant, from his perch
on the chair, encouraged Stevens to climb faster so as not to be
outstripped. With labored breath and straining muscles he climbed, the
Martyrs rolling on the floor in merriment all the more violent because
silent. Amidon himself laughed to see this strenuous climb, so
strikingly like human endeavor, which puts the climber out of breath,
and raises him not a whit--except in temperature. At the end of perhaps
five minutes, when Stevens might well have believed himself a hundred
feet above the roof, he had achieved a dizzy height of perhaps six feet,
on the summit of a stage-property mountain, where he stood beside the
Deacon Militant, his view of the surrounding plain cut off by
papier-mache clouds, and facing a foul fiend, to whom the Deacon
Militant confided that here was a candidate to be tested and qualified.
Whereupon the foul fiend remarked "Ha, ha!" and bade them bind him to
the Plutonian Thunderbolt and hurl him down to the nether world. The
thunderbolt was a sort of toboggan on rollers, for which there was a
slide running down presumably to the nether world, above mentioned.
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