Part 17 (1/2)

And he turned hohbors

Lad, being only a dog, had no such way of sharing his burden He had been told to find the child And his si his duty; be that duty irksome or easy

So he kept on Far ahead of the Master, his keen ears had not caught the sound of the shouts The gale and the snow muffled them and drove them back into the shouter's throat Cyril, naturally, had not had the reh the bitter cold and the snow to the house of any neighbor; there to tell his woeful tale of oppression The semblance of h for his purpose Once before, at home, when his father had ad, Cyril had one to hide in a chuonies of res The child saw no reason why the same tactics should not serve every bit as triumphantly, in the present case

He knew the maids were in the kitchen and at least one man was in the stables He did not want his whereabouts to be discovered before he should have been able to raise a healthy and dividend-bringing crop of remorse in the hearts of the Mistress and the Master, so he resolved to go farther afield

In the back of the meadow, across the road, and on the hither side of the forest, was a disused cattle-barrack, with two stalls under its roof-pile of hay The barrack was one of Cyril's favorite playhouses

It was dry and tight Through his thick clothing he was not likely to be very cold, there, for an hour or two He could snuggle down in the warm hay and play Indians, with considerable coht and penitence of his hosts should have come to a climax and make his return an ovation

Meanwhile, it would be fun to picture their uneasiness and fear for his safety; and to visualize their journeyings through the snow to the houses of various neighbors, in search of the lost child

Buoyed up by such happy thoughts as these, Cyril struck out at a lively pace for the highroad and into the field beyond The barrack, he knew, lay diagonally across the widewoods

Fivehionally

But, before he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack of stingingly hard-driven snow

The gray of the dying dusk was blotted out The wind s child Mechanically, he kept on for five or six ress Then, his spirit wavered Splendid as it would be to scare these hateful people, there was nothing splendid in the weather that numbed him with cold and took away his breath and half-blinded hi others suffer; if he hi the barrack, he would have all that freezing and blast-haain Aas the use?

And Cyril cah enterprise Turning around, he began to retrace his stue field, in a blizzard and in pitch darkness, and with no visible landmarks, it is not easy to double back on one's route, with any degree of accuracy In Cyril's case, the thing holly i in an erratic half-circle Another hroad, not far froed his course, to seek the road, he le to his for progress brought hiainst a solid barrier His chilled face cah contact with the top rail of a line fence

So relieved was the startled child by this encounter that he forgot to whine at the abrasion wrought upon his cheek by the rail He had begun to feel the first gnawings of panic Now, at once, he was calain

For he knehere he was This was the line fence between the Place's upper section and the land of the next neighbor

All he need do was to walk along in the shelter of it, touching the rails now and then to , until he should coe It was absurdly easy; co Besides, the lee of the fence afforded a certain shelter from wind and snow The child realized he had been turned about in the dark; and had been going in the wrong direction

But now, at last, his course seemed plain to him

So he set off briskly, close to the fence;--and directly away from the nearby road

For another half-hour he continued his inexplicably long tra to the road in a fewout from the fence, in order to skirt a wide hazel thicket, he tripped over an outcrop of rock, and tuain the fence; but the fall had shaken his senses and he floundered off in the opposite direction After a rod or two of such futile plunging, a stue of the world, and into the air

All this, for the merest instant Then, he landed with a jounce in a heap of brush and dead leaves Squatting there, breathless, he stretched out his round At the end of less than another yard of this exploring, his fingers cae of the world and were thrust out over nothingness

With hideous suddenness, Cyril understood where he was; and what had happened to him and why He knew he had followed the fence for a full radually upward until he had come the line of hazels on the lip of the ninety-foot ravine which dipped down into a swamp-stretch known as ”Pancake Hollow”

That hat he had done In trying to skirt the hazels, he had stepped over the cliff-edge, and had dropped five feet or e that juts out over the ravine

Well did he ree More than once, on walks with the Mistress and the Master, he had paused to look down on it and to think fun it would be to i the victiht And now, he, hiht have fallen the whole ninety feet; for the ledge did not extend far along the face of the cliff At alht have risly theh, till help should come And, here, the blast of the wind did not reach hi low in the litter of leaves and fallen brush, he could ward off a little of the icy cold