With this Abner Beech turned and walked resolutely off.
Left alone with me, Ni threw away the half-eaten apple he had held in his hand. “I don’t want any of his dummed old spitzenbergs,” he said, pushing his foot into the heap of fruit on the ground, in a meditative way.
“Then you ain’t agoin’ South?” I queried.
“Yes, I am!” he replied, with decision. “I can work my way somehow. Only don’t you whisper a word about it to any livin’ soul, d’ye mind!”
Two or three days after that we heard that Ni Hagadorn had left for unknown parts. Some said he had gone to enlist—it seems that, despite his youth and small stature in my eyes, he would have been acceptable to the enlistment standards of the day—but the major opinion was that much dime-novel reading had inspired him with the notion of becoming a trapper in the mystic Far West.
I alone possessed the secret of his disappearance—unless, indeed, his sister knew—and no one will ever know what struggles I had to keep from confiding it to Hurley.