the robbery, and all the rest, and she was so delighted to find somebody
to make an impression on that she had come out to talk while Ralph was
at work. But just at this moment the school-master was not so much
interested in her interesting remarks, nor so much amused by her amusing
remarks, as he should have been. He saw a man coming down the road
riding one horse and leading another, and he recognized the horses at a
distance. It must be Bud who was riding Means's bay mare and leading
Bud's roan colt. Bud had been to mill, and as the man who owned the
horse-mill kept but one old blind horse himself, it was necessary that
Bud should take two. It required three horses to run the mill; the old
blind one could have ground the grist, but the two others had to
overcome the friction of the clumsy machine. But it was not about the
horse-mill that Ralph was thinking nor about the two horses. Since that
Wednesday evening on which he escorted Hannah home from the
spelling-school he had not seen Bud Means. If he had any lingering
doubts of the truth of what Mirandy had said, they had been dissipated
by the absence of Bud from school.

"When I was to Bosting--" Miss Martha was _to_ Boston only once in her
life, but as her visit to that sacred city was the most important
occurrence of her life, she did not hesitate to air her reminiscences of
it frequently. "When I was to Bosting," she was just saying, when,
following the indication of Ralph's eyes, she saw Bud coming up the hill
near Squire Hawkins's house. Bud looked red and sulky, and to Ralph's
and Miss Martha Hawkins's polite recognitions he returned only a surly
nod. They both saw that he was angry. Ralph was able to guess the
meaning of his wrath.

Toward evening Ralph strolled through the Squire's cornfield toward the
woods. The memory of the walk with Hannah was heavy upon the heart of
the young master, and there was comfort in the very miserableness of the
cornstalks with their disheveled blades hanging like tattered banners
and rattling discordantly in the rising wind. Wandering without purpose,
Ralph followed the rows of stalks first one way and then the other in a
zigzag line, turning a right angle every minute or two. At last he came
out in a woods mostly of beech, and he pleased his melancholy fancy by
kicking the dry and silky leaves before him in billows, while the
soughing of the wind through the long, vibrant boughs and slender twigs
of the beech forest seemed t