Our Frank | Page 4

the lad. I'll stop here, and burn a light and keep his supper
ready. Poor little lad, he'll be starved with hunger!"
But the night waned, and no tidings came of Frank. Jack Gunn came
back from Danecross having learned nothing, and the poor mother's
fears increased. The boy must be wandering in those weary woods,
afraid to come home--or perhaps lost. Such a thing had been known
before now; and as the first streaks of light appeared in the sky, and she
saw the dim figure of her husband returning alone, Mrs Darvell's
courage quite forsook her.
"I shall never see him no more," she said to herself, and cried bitterly.
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And where was "our Frank" meanwhile?
At the moment when Mrs Darvell began to climb Whiteleaf Hill with
her heavy basket, Frank was lying at the foot of a big beech-tree in the
wood near his home; his face was buried in his hands, and every now
and then sobs shook his little thin frame. For it had been a most
unfortunate day for him; everything had gone wrong, and by the time
the evening came and work was over his father's wrath was high. Frank

knew what to expect, and he also remembered that there would be no
mother at home to shield him from punishment, so waiting a favourable
moment he slipped off into the wood before he was missed. Then he
flung himself on the ground and cried, because he felt so tired, and
weak, and hopeless; and as he thought of his father's angry face and
heavy uplifted hand he shivered with terror. How he longed for
someone to comfort and speak kindly to him. Soon, he knew, his
mother would be in from market; there would be a blazing fire at home,
and supper, and a warm corner. Should he venture back? But then,
morning would come again, and the hard work, and he would have to
stumble along the sticky furrows all day, and there would be blows and
threatenings to end with. No, he could not go back; it would be better
even, he said to himself, to beg for his bread like the tramps he had
seen sometimes in Danecross.
As he came to this conclusion he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked
round him. It was about six o'clock, and already very dusk in the wood,
though the little dancing leaves of the Leeches could not make much
shadow yet, for it was only April; all round the boy rose the grey
straight stems of the trees, and tufts of primroses shone out whitely
here and there on the ground. It was perfectly still and silent, except
that a cold little wind rustled the branches, and the birds were making a
few last twittering notes before they went to sleep--"a harmony," as the
country folks called it. Frank got up and hurried on, for he knew that
directly mother returned search would be made for him. He must get a
long way on before that, and hide somewhere for the night. That side of
the wood near Green Highlands was quite familiar to him, and though
there were no paths, and it all looked very much alike, he knew what
direction to take for the hiding-place he had in view. A town boy would
soon have become confused, and perhaps have ended in finding himself
at Green Highlands again, but Frank knew better than that, and he
stumbled steadily along in his heavy boots, getting gradually and surely
further away from home and deeper in the wood.
How quiet it was, and how fast the darkness seemed to close round him!
All the birds were silent soon, except that a jay sometimes startled him
with its harsh sudden cry; once a rabbit rushed so quickly across his

path that he almost fell on it. On and on he went at a steady jog-trot
pace, looking neither to right nor left. Now, if you have ever been in a
beech wood, you must remember that winter and summer the ground is
covered with the old dead brown leaves that have fallen from the trees.
So thick they lie, that in some places you can stand knee-deep in them,
especially if there are any hollows into which they have been drifted by
the wind; this particular wood was full of such hollows, some of them
wide and long enough for a tall man to lie down in, and Frank knew
exactly where to find them. Turning aside, therefore, at a certain clump
of bushes there was the very thing he wanted--bed and hiding-place at
once. It was a broad shallow pit or hollow filled quite up to the top with
the red-brown beech leaves. He scooped out a place just large