"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

The crowd began gathering in front of Boston's old red brick Touraine Hotel before anyone inside knew that someone had climbed out a ninth-floor window and was teetering on a ledge high above Boylston Street. The Touraine faces Boston Common like a stage set; within minutes, traffic was inexorably jammed and thousands were jostling together in the afternoon drizzle, heads back, faces eager, eyes fixed on the improbable figure high above them.

The ledge-walker was a teen-age boy in a wine red shirt and khaki pants. He dropped his jacket. The crowd rumbled as it fell. "Jump!" bawled a voice from the street. The figure swayed out, then shrank back, arms reaching toward windows on either side. New cries arose: "C'mon! Jump! Get the show on the road!"

At first, a great many spectators had been yelling in fun, apparently in the belief that they were watching a publicity stunt for the Boston showing of "Fourteen Hours," a motion picture based on a death leap from Manhattan's Gotham Hotel. But as time passed, an excited, nervous tension seemed to build up among the craning throng. "Jump!" they yelled. The voices in the street kept on for one hour and 35 minutes. For one hour and 35 minutes people peering from a window of the room nearest the boy fought against the crowd in a kind of insane debate.

Girl at the Window. The first would-be rescuers--a bellhop, a traveling salesman, a sweating, gentle-voiced detective--could see nothing of the boy but one dirty hand which gripped the window facing. Eying it, they pleaded. After a while, the dirty fingers groped toward them and took a lighted cigarette. But then the crowd sounds swelled below--the fingers had flipped the cigarette out and down. "Come in," the detective cajoled. A voice beyond the hand mumbled, "Why should I?"

"Jump!" yelled the crowd. But one among them, a 21-year-old waitress named Mrs. Marilyne Giannattasio, began pushing fiercely toward the hotel. As she came into the lobby the bellhops turned to watch her. "Stacked," was their word for Marilyne. Her dark hair flowed to her shoulders, her lipstick was a defiant red, her earrings jangled. Marilyne did not notice them; after one horrified look she had been moved by a sudden, pitying compulsion to save the figure on the ledge.

When the cops tried to bar her way, she lied desperately: "I know him. I can stop him." They let her into the room. She leaned out. The boy had dark hair and a long jaw; his eyes were sullen, sly, dazed. He was standing on a sloping, twelve-inch rim of stone, his toes lower than his heels.

He let himself sway out. The girl remonstrated indignantly: she had trouble too; she had a 17-month-old baby and the baby was blind. "YOU should jump!"

Little by little the boy began to talk. His name was Louis Turini. No, his name was really Albert Santos. But they had misunderstood in the Army and put him down as Albert Thomas. Now he was AWOL--two weeks AWOL. He complained about his divorced parents, his boyhood in Boston's slums. He babbled in bewildered tones about a girl. "My girl ran off with a musician. He smokes marijuana. I know she's ruined ..."

Cop in the Closet. After a while he let the waitress hold his hand. Then he slipped, almost fell, and jerked away like a trapped animal. Hundreds clapped hands and yelled in unison, like a baseball crowd demanding a rally. A girl, giggling beside a sailor, said: "I'm the gory type. I want to see him jump." A matron in a lavender hat darted into the cleared space just below the boy, arms outstretched. "Jump," she called. "I'll catch you." Up on his dizzy perch, the boy called to Marilyne in a strained voice: "They want me to jump."

By now a new voice was speaking to him. A Jesuit priest, the Rev. Joseph P. Curran, had seen him from the street, had hurried to the room, had asked the police to leave. He talked quietly. Finally the boy put one leg through the open window. Then he stopped: "It's a cop trick."

The priest shook his head, and to prove there were no cops around, threw the closet door open. To his own surprise there was a red-faced policeman inside. The boy scrambled back on the ledge, stood swaying, staring down. The policeman hurried out of the room. The priest began again. After a long time, the boy edged back to the window. Trembling, he stepped inside. He wept. A cop burst in and slammed down the window. Marilyne took a few sagging steps and fainted. Below, the crowd straggled reluctantly and noisily away. "No," someone yelled. "But almost!" A Navy commander with three rows of campaign ribbons said quietly: "In two wars I've never seen anything so horrible. It makes you hate people."

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