Jack Harvey and Tom Edwards, gazing into each other’s faces with the blankness of despair, shook hands silently. They could not speak.
CHAPTER IX
FACES THROUGH THE TELESCOPE
It was after school hours in the little city of Benton, on a day near the middle of December, and a party of youths, with skates under their arms, were walking toward the bank of Mill stream. A huge fire, of pieces of logs and brush-wood, blazed cheerily by the shore, and welcomed their approach. The frozen surface of the stream, swept clean by high winds of previous days, shone like polished ebony, and stretched away to the northward for a mile before it became lost to view amid high banks, on its winding course.
The sun, a great red ball, nearing the western horizon, sent a rose-tinged pathway across the black ice from shore to shore. A score or more of skaters, some engaged in cutting fancy figures, others swinging along on the outward roll, others having an impromptu race, made the air ring with their shouts of hearty enjoyment.
Seated on a log, by the fire, one of the party of boys addressed his nearest comrade.
“Say, Henry Burns,” he asked, “have you heard anything from Harvey, yet?”
Henry Burns, a rather slight but trimly built and active youth, apparently a year or two younger than the boy who had spoken, paused in the adjustment of the clamp of his skate, and looked puzzled.
“No,” he answered, “and, what’s more, I don’t expect to, now. Jack Harvey rather take a licking than write a letter, anyway. And, another thing, he’s having too much fun, I suppose, to stop to write.”
“Still, it’s queer,” he continued. “I didn’t think he’d go off the way he did. He told me he wouldn’t go, no matter how much his folks urged him. Said he knew he’d have more fun here with us this winter than poking ’round Europe with his father and mother; said his mother wouldn’t let him wear his sweater in art galleries and in stores—rather skate, and fish through the ice, than dress up and go around looking at things in shop windows and museums.”
“Well, they must have got him to go, after all,” said the first boy.