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.
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