“Your mother and I have decided that since you must spend another summer alone you might as well have the camping trip you had so counted on last year. Ask any three of the boys you like and make all your own plans. Otto Bradford at Mason’s Falls will be the best guide for you to take; you remember we had him two years ago. Indeed, if your Easter vacation is extended, as the headmaster wrote me it might be, you could run out to Montana and make your arrangements with Otto; that would probably be most satisfactory. You are old enough now to manage such matters.”
Again Billy laid down the paper and sat thinking. Here was the thing that, next to his father’s and mother’s coming, he had long wanted above all others. A camping trip—among those wonderful mountains—planned by himself—to include just the boys he wanted. Whom should he ask? There was—
“Come on, Billy Wentworth, or you’ll miss the train.” The shout from the hall below brought him quickly to his senses. They were all leaving for Chicago to play the last basketball game of the season; it was from there that they were to scatter for the holidays. He seized his suitcase, jammed on his hat and ran downstairs. He would have to decide on the way whether he would go West at once or not.
It was not unnatural, perhaps, that a party of boys wrapped up in their own and the school’s affairs, should have very little knowledge of the bigger matters of the outside world. Lately, however, events were becoming so exciting, situations were growing so tense, that every boy, the moment he got on the train, must have his paper and devour the daily news. For nearly three years the war had waged in Europe, a war far too big to realize, far too distant to be very disturbing to a schoolboy’s daily life. But now war was coming near, the war with Germany that every one suddenly discovered had been inevitable from the first, yet for which every one had been too busy to get ready. It was the week before Easter, the season of that April session of Congress when the war-bill slowly but surely made its way through Senate and House, and the possibility of a struggle became a final reality.
The party of boys reached Chicago on Monday, and played their basketball game that evening. For a moment the victory that was so hardly but so triumphantly won by their team blotted out in Billy’s mind the memory of what was stirring the whole world outside. Yet even on the way back to the hotel he felt the thrill in the air, he saw crowds gathering about the bulletin boards and heard some one say, “The President is addressing Congress now.”
He went to bed clinging somehow to the obstinate thought,
“There can’t be war, there can’t. Things like that happen to other people, in other places. Nothing happens here at home.” When he got up in the morning the war again seemed far away. The whole party of boys was to be taken out by their hosts of the rival school, to be shown some of the sights of Chicago before train time. They all stood waiting in the lobby for the automobiles to come up, when the mail was brought in and some one handed Billy a letter.
It was a note from his aunt who had been spending the winter in Boston.
“I am going down to Appledore Island for Easter,” it said, “although I have never been there so early in the season before. I have a fancy to try it, and wonder whether you would feel tempted to try it with me. I happened to hear that your vacation is to be longer than usual, so that it would give you time to come. I admit that the invitation does not seem a very exciting one, but, if you happen to have no other place to go, you might be glad of my company, as I shall be so glad to have yours.” There was a postscript added,
“If you should happen to arrive before I do, and do not find the hotel ready, you could stay with Captain Saulsby.”