But recently everything
has gotten so dreadfully mixed in my mind, I can't be sure of anything.
Perhaps I am mistaken."

"War has to be, young man," Billy's mild-mannered friend announced,
nodding his head.

"Yes, that is what everybody says," the boy agreed.

Then the somewhat pointless conversation was obliged to end, as the hour
for lunch had passed.

Among the experiences which Billy Webster was particularly enjoying at
this time were his long walks back and forth from the place where he was
spending his nights to the scene of his daily labors.

For, literally, he only spent his nights at the Sunrise camp. He arrived
at home after the others had finished dinner, and rose and went away
each morning just after daylight. But instead of the long, fatiguing
walks, added to the unusual work of the war camp, injuring Billy's
health--never had he appeared so strong and well.

Not that any one, aside from his mother, was paying particular attention
to Billy's vagaries. Even Vera Lagerloff, for the first time in their
long friendship, temporarily was neglecting Billy's welfare in her
enthusiasm over the approaching production of "As You Like It."

However, Billy rejoiced in his new freedom.

He took pleasure in slipping out of his tent in the early morning,
leaving Dan still asleep. Then he would prepare his own breakfast of
coffee, fruit and eggs which were always left where he could readily
find them. Afterwards, with his basket of lunch that his mother made
ready the night before, Billy would move quietly off.

Even the dawns in this southwestern world were unlike the dawns Billy
remembered in his own New Hampshire hills. Not that he would have
claimed the New Hampshire hills as his possession because of a mere
accident of birth. Billy cared infinitely more for the softness, the
warmth and strangeness of this new country and climate than he had ever
cared for the austerity of New England. It was awakening in him new
strength and new purposes which so far he scarcely understood.

The way the dawn broke here in the western coast Billy particularly
loved; it was so serene. There was not the drear, melancholy darkness
and then the swift coming of light. But first a pearl-gray mist covered
the sky, afterwards lavender and rose shone behind it and finally a pure
gold, with the ocean as a mirror of the sky.

A part of the trip he could make by street car, nevertheless this left
many miles to be traveled at either en