He whistled as he went on.
Ephraim stood watching him. He had enough brave blood in his veins to
feel that this contempt of a whipping was a greater thing than not
being whipped. He felt an envious admiration of Ezra Ray, but that
did not prevent his calling after him:
"Ezra!"
"What say?"
"You ain't goin' to tell my mother?"
"Didn't I say I wasn't? I don't tell fibs. Hope to die if I do."
Ezra's brave whistle, as cheerfully defiant of his mother's
prospective wrath as the note of a bugler advancing to the charge,
died away in the distance. For Ephraim now began the one unrestrained
hilarity of his whole life. All by himself in the white moonlight and
the keen night air he climbed the long hill, and slid down over and
over. He ignored his feeble and laboring breath of life. He trod
upon, he outspeeded all infirmities of the flesh in his wild triumph
of the spirit. He shouted and hallooed as he shot down the hill. His
mother could not have recognized his voice had she heard it, for it
was the first time that the boy had ever given full cry to the
natural voice of youth and his heart. A few stolen races, and sorties
up apple-trees, a few stolen slides had poor Ephraim Thayer had; they
had been snatched in odd minutes, at the imminent danger of
discovery; but now he had the wide night before him; he had broken
over all his trammels, and he was free.
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