VIII.
A WILFUL BOY.
The determination which Will had made was that if he couldn’t be allowed to go to the woods properly, then he would go improperly.
He would be off. Yes, sir—he would be off, just ahead of the supply-team, which had not yet gone, and the men would feel obliged to take him on when they overtook him. They couldn’t leave him there, and they couldn’t spare the time to turn about and take him home—and so he would get to the logging-camp in spite of everyone.
As he stood thinking, he heard Janet, who had a pretty talent for music, at her practicing, playing in childish fashion the Spinning Song. He half heard in it the whirr of the wheel, the beat of the treadle, the song of the spinning girl, the rustle of leaves outside her, the hum of bees and stir of wind, and twitter of birds in the branches. And that was the last Will heard and saw of home that day. For he put on his reefer, pulled his sealskin cap over his ears, hung his skates on his arm, and with his hands buried in his pockets went down the field to take a short cut and get the start of the team.
Will felt himself very ill-used. There he was, kept at his books, with a woman to teach him, and obliged to look forward to a life of study, when he wanted to be using his muscles, to be shooting and trapping, following the deer, snaring small game!
It was very short-sighted and a great injustice on Old Uncle’s part, Will reasoned; and he couldn’t see what Aunt Susan had been thinking of; and he was very indignant with his Aunt Rose, who had insisted on those horrid rules in the subjunctive; and as for Janet she could chop all the Latin she wished—he preferred to chop wood!
Nursing his wrath, Will ran and walked and skipped along. Reaching the highway, he got a lift of some miles by clinging to the runners of a surveying party’s cutter. He got a bowl of bread and milk at a wayside shanty, for which he paid all the pennies in his pocket, then had another ride of a couple of hours on a slow ox-team laboring along to an isolated farm.
And now he was already in the woods, not the deep forest of the loggers in the remote north—that was still a journey off—but where the highway was to be guessed by the open spaces between the lower hills, as there were no marks of travel on the snow-crust. The air was already obscure, although he could see a belt of sunset through the boles of the trees. He began to have a very desolate sensation.