Illogically, he felt
it was all Bill's fault that he must endure this annoyance.
That fall, the boy started to high school in Fallon, making the
long daily ride to and from town on horseback. He was a good
pupil and the hours he spent with his lessons were precious; they
made the farm drift away. To his mind, which was opening like a
bud, it seemed that history was the recorded romance of men who
were everything but farmers. School books told fascinating
stories of conquerors, soldiers, inventors, writers, engineers,
kings, statesmen and orators. He would sit and dream of the doers
of great deeds. When he read of Alexander the Great, Bill was he.
He was Caesar and Napoleon, Washington and Lincoln, Grant and
Edison and Shakespeare. When railroads were built in the pages of
his American History, it was Bill, himself, no less, who was the
presiding genius. His imagination constructed and levelled, and
rebuilt and remade.
One beautiful November afternoon, in his Junior year, at the
sound of the last bell, which usually found him cantering out of
town, he went instead to the school reading-room, and, sitting
down calmly, opened his book and slowly read. The clock ticked
off the seconds he was stealing from his father; counted the
minutes that had never belonged to Bill before, but which now
tasted like old wine on the palate. He cuddled down, lost to the
world until five o'clock, when the building was closed.
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