't be spiteful and kick her."

As we neared the bars in the brush fence we saw several of the colts at
the upper side of the clearing beyond the old barn. At the first call
from us, up went their pretty heads; there was a general whinny, and
then they came racing to the bars to greet us. Perhaps they had been a
little homesick so far from stables and barns.

"One--two--three--four--why, they are not all here!" Theodora said.
"Here are only seven. Lib isn't here, or Mrs. Kennard's Sylph."

"Oh, I guess they're not far off," Addison said, and began calling, "Co'
jack, co' jack!" He wanted them all there before he dropped the salt in
little piles on the grassy greensward.

But the absent ones did not come. Ellen ventured the opinion that they
might have jumped the fence and wandered off.

"Oh, they wouldn't separate up here in the woods," Addison said. "Colts
keep together when off in a back pasture like this."

But when he went on calling and they still did not come, we began really
to fear that they had got out and strayed.

"Let's go round the fence," Addison said at last, "and see if we find a
gap, or hoofprints on the outside, where they have jumped over."

He and Theodora went one way, Ellen and I the other. We met halfway
round the clearing without having discovered either gaps in the fence or
tracks outside. Remembering that horses, when rolling, sometimes get
cast in hollows between knolls, we searched the entire clearing, and
even looked into the old barn, the door of which stood slightly ajar;
but we found no trace of the missing animals and began to believe that
they really had jumped out.

We gave the seven colts their salt and were about to start home to
report to the old Squire when Ellen remarked that we had not actually
looked among the alders down by the brook, where the colts went for
water.

"Oh, but those colts would not stay down there by themselves all this
time with us calling them!" Addison exclaimed.

"But let's just take a look, to be certain," Ellen replied, and she and
I ran down there.

We had no more than pushed our way through the alder clumps when two
crows rose silently and went flapping away; and then I caught sight of
something that made me stop short: the body of one of the Morgan
colts--our Lib--lying close to the brook!

"Oh!" gasped Ellen. "It's dead!"

Pushing on through the alders, we saw one of the Percherons near the
Morgan. The sight affected Ellen so much that