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 comfort; until such time
as the fright 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 wide meadow, and near the adjoining woods.
Five minutes of tramping through the snow ought to bring him to it. And
he set off, diagonally.

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 smote and battered
the spindling child. Mechanically, he kept on for five or six minutes,
making scant and irregular progress. 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 him with snow.

What was the fun of making others suffer; if he himself were suffering
tenfold more? And, on reaching the barrack, he would have all that
freezing and blast-hammering trip back again. Aw, what was the use?

And Cyril came to a halt. He had definitely abandoned his high
enterprise. Turning around, he began to retrace his stumbling steps.
But, at best, in a large field, in