His special crony at school was Alfred Batchelder, who had an extremely bad influence on him. Alfred was a genius at instigating mischief, and he and Halstead played an odious prank at the schoolhouse, as a result of which the school committee suspended them for three weeks. That was unfortunate, for it turned the boys loose to run about in company. Usually they quarreled by the time they had been together half a day; but this time there seemed to be a special bond between them, and they hatched a secret project to go off trapping up in the great woods. They intended to stay until spring, when they would reappear with five hundred dollar's worth of fur! Addison and I guessed that something of the sort was in the wind, for we noticed that Halstead was collecting old traps and that he was oiling a gun he called his. We also missed two thick horse blankets from the stable and a large hand sled. A frozen quarter of beef also disappeared from the wagon-house chamber. "Let him go, and good riddance," Addison said, and we decided not to tell grandmother or the girls what we suspected. In fact, I fear that we hoped Halstead would go. The following Friday afternoon while the rest of us were at school both boys disappeared. That evening Mrs. Batchelder sent over to inquire whether Alfred was at our house. Halstead, to his credit, had shown that he did not wish grandmother to worry about him. Shortly before two o'clock that afternoon, he had come hastily to the sitting-room door, and said, "Good-by, gram. I'm going away for a spell. Don't worry." Then, shutting the door, he had run off before she could reply or ask a question. When we got home from school that night, Addison and I found traces of the runaways. There had been rain the week before, followed by a hard freeze and snow squalls, which had left a film of light snow on the hard crust beneath. At the rear of the west barn we found the tracks of a hand sled leading off across the fields toward the woods. "Gone hunting, I guess," said Addison. "They are probably heading for the Old Slave's Farm, or for Adger's lumber camp. Let them go. They'll be sick to death of it in a week." I felt much the same about it; but grandmother and Theodora were not a little disturbed. Ellen, however, sided with Addison. "Halse will be back by to-morrow night," she said. "He and Alfred will have a spat by that time." Saturday and Sunday passed, however, and then all the following week, with no word from them. On Tuesday evening, when they had been gone eleven days, Mrs. Batchelder hastened in with alarming news for us. She had had a letter from Alfred, she said, written from Berlin Falls in New Hampshire, where he had gone to work in a mill; but he had not said one word about Halstead! "I don't think they could have gone off together," she said, and she read Alfred's letter aloud to us, or seemed to do so, but did not hand it to any of us to read.