Had any means of escape offered itself, Paul Burton would have embraced it without thought of the honors of war.  He had no wish to stand upon the order of his going.  He earnestly desired to go at once.  But under what semblance of excuse could he cover his retreat?  Suddenly his necessity fathered a crafty subterfuge.  The bucket of drinking water stood near his desk—­and it was well-nigh empty.  Becoming violently thirsty, he sought permission to carry it to the spring for refilling, and his heart leaped hopefully when the tired-eyed teacher indifferently nodded her assent.  He meant to carry the pail to the spring.  He even meant to fill it for the sake of technical obedience.  Later, some one else could go out and fetch it back.

Paul’s object would be served when once he was safe from the stored-up wrath of the Marquess kid.  As he carried the empty bucket down the aisle, he felt upon him the derisive gaze of a pair of blue eyes entirely surrounded by freckles, and his own eyes drooped before their challenge and contempt.  They drooped also as he met the questioning gaze of his elder brother, Ham, whose seat was just at the door.  Ham had a disquieting capacity for reading Paul’s thoughts, and an equally disquieting scorn of cowardice.  But Paul closed the door behind him, and, in the freedom of the outer air, set his lips to whistling a casual tune.  He could never be for a moment alone without breaking into some form of music.  It was his nature’s language and his soul’s soliloquy.

Of course tomorrow would bring a reckoning for truancy and a probable renewal of his danger, but tomorrow is after all another day and for this afternoon at least he felt safe.

But Ham Burton’s uncanny powers of divination were at work, and out of his seat he slipped unobserved.  Through the door he flitted shadow-like and strolled along in the wake of his younger brother.

Down where the spring crooned softly over its mossy rocks and where young brook trout darted in phantom flashes, Ham Burton found Paul with his face tight-clasped in his nervous hands.  Back there in the school-house had been only terror, but out here was something else.  A specter of self-contempt had risen to contend with physical trepidation.  The song of the water and the rustle of the leaves where the breeze harped among the platinum shafts of the birches were pleading with this child-dreamer, and in his mind a conflict swept backward and forward.  Paul did not at once see his brother, and the older boy stood over him in silence, watching the mental fight; watching until he knew that it was lost and that timidity had overpowered shame.  His own eyes at first held only scorn for such a poltroon attitude, but suddenly there leaped into them a fierce glow of tenderness, which he as quickly masked.  At the end of his silent contemplation he brusquely demanded, “Well, Paul, how long is it going to take you to fill that bucket with water?”