That night, Billy in his bunk, sleepless and consumed with longing for home and the excitement of the bungalow element, planned desertion. At midnight he crept to the larder and packed enough food to last for a couple of days, at four o'clock he stole from the sleeping-shed, and, cheered by the unanimous snores that rang in his ears, he turned his freckled, determined face toward St. Angé and the one absorbing passion of his life.
The outlook of the Solitude at four in the morning was not an altogether cheerful one even to ambitious youth. Indeed there was little, if any, outlook.
Blackness around; cold starlight overhead. Snow and ice everywhere except on the trail that a "V" plow had made through the forest.
It was cruelly still and lonely. "Gawd," said Billy raising his eyes to the emptiness above him, "you see me to the end of this, and, by gosh! I'll swear to go to Hillcrest to school."
From irreligious depravity, Billy had risen to reverent heights, and Hillcrest restraint was beautiful in his thought, as a method of preparing him for—Her.
A fear he had never known had birth in Billy's heart then as he slipped and slid down the icy trail that had been flooded and frozen for the passage of the logs. Even his unprotected boyhood had been shielded from four-o'clock journeys in the wintry woods heretofore.
The only help Billy could draw from the situation was, that so far he could refrain from whistling. When in this tense state a boy is reduced to whistling all hope for strength is gone.
A distant groan; swish! ah! ah! and crash! rent the stillness. The boy drew his breath in sharp.
"D—— blast that tree!" gurgled he, "what did it have to fall for now?"
Suddenly a deer darted across the trail and turned its wondering eyes on the small brother of the woods. Billy's spirits rose. The wild things were friends. The boy's depravity had always been redeemed by a lack of cruelty.