d so. He was
dead, there in the moon.

I straightened him, and put my coat across his face, and spurred back
down the road again and over the gate. But my mother already knew. She
met me at the hall, and her face was white.

"Jack," she said, "I know!"

Then the servants came, and we brought him home, and laid him in his own
great room, as the master of the house should lie when the end comes,
and arrayed him like the gentleman he was.

Now came that old wire-hair, Doctor Bond, his mane standing stiff and
gray over a gray face, down which tears rolled the first time known of
any man. He sent my mother away and called me to him. And then he told
me that in my father's back were three or four pierced wounds, no doubt
received from the sharp stubs of underbrushes when he fell. But this, he
said, could hardly have been the cause of death. He admitted that the
matter seemed mysterious to him.

Up to this time we had not thought of the cause of this disaster, nor
pondered upon motives, were it worse than accident. Now we began to
think. Doctor Bond felt in the pockets of my father's coat; and so for
the first time we found his account book and his wallets. Doctor Bond
and I at once went out and searched the saddle pockets my father had
carried. They were quite empty.

All this, of course, proved nothing to us. The most that we could argue
was that the horse in some way had thrown his rider, and that the fall
had proved fatal; and that perhaps some wandering negro had committed
the theft. These conclusions were the next day bad for the horse Satan,
whom I whipped and spurred, and rode till he trembled, meting out to him
what had been given old Klingwalla, his sire, for another murdering deed
like this. In my brutal rage I hated all the world. Like the savage I
was, I must be avenged on something. I could not believe that my father
was gone, the man who had been my model, my friend, my companion all my
life.

But in time we laid him away in the sunny little graveyard of the
Society of Friends, back of the little stone church at Wallingford. We
put a small, narrow, rough little slab of sandstone at his head, and cut
into it his name and the dates of his birth and death; this being all
that the simple manners of the Society of Friends thought fit. "His
temple is in my heart," said my mother; and from that day to her death
she offered tribute to him.

Thus, I say, it was that I changed from a boy into a man. But not the