There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog. Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for. Unbelievable that there were other trees which looked like it here. It had loomed in my memory as a huge lone spike dominating the riverbank, forbidding as an artillery piece, high as the beanstalk. Yet here it was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur.
Standing on this limb, you could by a prodigious effort jump far enough out into the river for safety. So we had heard…. No Upper Middler, which was the name for our class in the Devon School, had ever tried. Naturally Finny was going to be the first to try, and just as naturally he was going to inveigle others, us, into trying it with him.
We were walking again, faster; Bobby and Leper and Chet were urging us from ahead for God’s sake to hurry up, and then Finny trapped me again in his strongest trap, that is, I suddenly became his collaborator.