one o'clock
`` And breakfast early , and make all the preparations you can before that . '' At this they went away , leaving Fred alone , but far too full of excitement to sleep . He sorted out his warmest clothing , carefully examined and oiled his hockey skates and boots , wrote a necessary letter or two , and did such other things as occurred to him . It was long past one o'clock when he did go to bed , and even then he could not sleep . His mind was full of the dangerous expedition that he had plunged into within the last hours . His imagination saw vividly the picture of the long ice road through the wilderness , a hundred and fifty miles to the lonely trappers ' shack , where a white man lay sick with a bag of diamonds on his breast -- or perhaps by this time lay dead with the secret of immense riches lost with him . And the ice road might close to-morrow .