“Well,” I replied in a stronger voice, “first I stole all his money. Then I found that he cheated on his entrance tests to Devon and I blackmailed his parents about that, then I made love to his sister in Mr. Ludsbury’s study, then I …” it was going well, faint grins were appearing around the room, even the younger boy seemed to suspect that he was being “sincere” about a joke, a bad mistake to make at Devon, “then I …” I only had to add, “pushed him out of the tree” and the chain of implausibility would be complete, “then I …” just those few words and perhaps this dungeon nightmare would end.

But I could feel my throat closing on them; I could never say them, never.

I swung on the younger boy. “What did I do then?” I demanded. “I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of theories. Come on, reconstruct the crime. There we were at the tree. Then what happened, Sherlock Holmes?”

His eyes swung guiltily back and forth. “Then you just pushed him off, I’ll bet.”

“Lousy bet,” I said offhandedly, falling into a chair as though losing interest in the game. “You lose. I guess you’re Dr. Watson, after all.”

They laughed at him a little, and he squirmed and looked guiltier than ever. He had a very weak foothold among the Butt Room crowd, and I had pretty well pushed him off it. His glance flickered out at me from his defeat, and I saw to my surprise that I had, by making a little fun of him, brought upon myself his unmixed hatred. For my escape this was a price I was willing to pay.

“French, French,” I exclaimed. “Enough of this contretemps. I’ve got to study my French.” And I went out.

Going up the stairs I heard a voice from the Butt Room say, “Funny, he came all the way down here and didn’t even have a smoke.”

But this was a clue they soon seemed to forget. I detected no Sherlock Holmes among them, nor even a Dr. Watson. No one showed any interest in tracking me, no one pried, no one insinuated. The daily lists of appointments lengthened with the rays of the receding autumn sun until the summer, the opening day, even yesterday became by the middle of October something gotten out of the way and forgotten, because tomorrow bristled with so much to do.

In addition to classes and sports and clubs, there was the war. Brinker Hadley could compose his Shortest War Poem Ever Written

The War

Is a bore

if he wanted to, but all of us had to take stronger action than that. First there was the local apple crop, threatening to rot because the harvesters had all gone into the army or war factories. We spent several shining days picking them and were paid in cash for it. Brinker was inspired to write his Apple Ode

Our chore

Is the core

of the war

and the novelty and money of these days excited us. Life at Devon was revealed as still very close to the ways of peace; the war was at worst only a bore, as Brinker said, no more taxing to us than a day spent at harvesting in an apple orchard.

Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, late one afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirling down into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks, the three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered there thicker by the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession so gently. I watched them whirl past my window—don’t take this seriously, the playful way they fell seemed to imply, this little show, this harmless trick.

It seemed to be true. The school was thinly blanketed that night, but the next morning, a bright, almost balmy day, every flake disappeared. The following weekend, however, it snowed again, then two days later much harder, and by the end of that week the ground had been clamped under snow for the winter.

In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about maids and days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was commandeered as its advance guard.

Leper Lepellier didn’t suspect this. It was not in fact evident to anyone at first. But Leper stands out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this and every other shift in our life at Devon.

The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on the Boston and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundred volunteers were solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the Emergency Usefulness policy adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we all volunteered, Brinker and I and Chet Douglass and even I noticed, Quackenbush.

But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to take us south to the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking a short cut through a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall, and I hardly recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, and he seemed from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I plodded toward him through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deer-stalker’s cap, brown ear muffs, a thick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognified the face in the midst of them, Leper’s, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distant woods through steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvas coat with sagging pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, he was wearing skis. They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, old-fashioned knobs on their tips.

“You think there’s a path through those woods?” he asked in his mild tentative voice when I got near. Leper did not switch easily from one train of thought to another, and even though I was an old friend whom he had not talked to in months I didn’t mind his taking me for granted now, even at this improbable meeting in a wide, empty field of snow.

“I’m not sure, Leper, but I think there’s one at the bottom of the slope.”

“Oh yeah, I guess there is.” We always called him Leper to his face; he wouldn’t have remembered to respond to any other name.

I couldn’t keep from staring at him, at the burlesque explorer look of him. “What are you,” I asked at last, “um, what are you doing, anyway?”

“I’m touring.”

“Touring.” I examined the long bamboo ski poles he held. “How do you mean, touring?”

“Touring. It’s the way you get around the countryside in the winter. Touring skiing. It’s how you go overland in the snow.”

“Where are you going?”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere.” He bent down to tighten the lacings on a puttee. “I’m just touring around.”

“There’s that place across the river where you could ski. The place where they have the rope tow on that steep hill across from the railroad station. You could go over there.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He surveyed the woods again, although his breath had fogged his glasses. “That’s not skiing.”

“Why sure that’s skiing. It’s a good little run, you can get going pretty fast on that hill.”

“Yeah but that’s it, that’s why it isn’t skiing. Skiing isn’t supposed to be fast. Skis are for useful locomotion.” He turned his inquiring eyes on me. “You can break a leg with that downhill stuff.”

“Not on that little hill.”

“Well, it’s the same thing. It’s part of the whole wrong idea. They’re ruining skiing in this country, rope tows and chair lifts and all that stuff. You get carted up, and then you whizz down. You never get to see the trees or anything. Oh you see a lot of trees shoot by, but you never get to really look at trees, at a tree. I just like to go along and see what I’m passing and enjoy myself.” He had come to the end of his thought, and now he slowly took me in, noticing my layers of old clothes. “What are you doing, anyway?” he asked mildly and curiously.