Jerome waited until she was out of sight, gave one last look down the road to be sure no other invaders were approaching his fortress, and then went on to the barn.  When he rolled back the door and entered, the old white horse stirred in his stall and turned to look at him.  There was something in the glance over the shoulder of that long white face which caused the heart of the boy to melt within him.  He pressed into the stall, flung up his little arms around the great neck, and sobbed and sobbed, his face hid against the heaving side.

The old horse had looked about, expecting to see Jerome’s father coming to feed and harness him into the wood-wagon, and Jerome knew it, and there was something about the consciousness of loss and sorrow of this faithful dumb thing which smote him in a weaker place than all human intelligence of it.

Abel Edwards had loved this poor animal well, and had set great store by his faithful service; and the horse had loved him, after the dumb fashion of his kind, and, indeed, not sensing that he was dead, loved him still, with a love as for the living, which no human being could compass.  Jerome, clinging to this dumb beast, to which alone the love of his father had not commenced, by those cruel and insensible gradations, to become the memory which is the fate, as inevitable as death itself, of all love when life is past, felt for the minute all his new strength desert him, and relapsed into childhood and clinging grief.  “You loved him, didn’t you?” he whispered between his sobs.  “You loved poor father, didn’t you, Peter?” And when the horse turned his white face and looked at him, with that grave contemplation seemingly indicative of a higher rather than a lower intelligence, with which an animal will often watch human emotion, he sobbed and sobbed again, and felt his heart fail him at the realization of his father’s death, and of himself, a poor child, with the burden of a man upon his shoulders.  But it was only for a few minutes that he yielded thus, for the stature of the mind of the boy had in reality advanced, and soon he drew himself up to it, stopped weeping, led the horse out to the well, drew bucket after bucket of water, and held them patiently to his plashing lips.  Then a neighbor in the next house, a half-acre away, looking across the field, called her mother to see how much Jerome Edwards looked like his father.  “It gave me quite a turn when I see him come out, he looked so much like his father, for all he’s so small,” said she.  “He walked out just like him; I declare, I didn’t know but he’d come back.”

Jerome, leading the horse, walked back to the barn in his father’s old tracks, with his father’s old gait, reproducing the dead with the unconscious mimicry of the living, while the two women across the field watched him from their window.  “It ain’t a good sign—­he’s got a hard life before him,” said the older of the two, who had wild blue eyes under a tousle of gray hair, and was held in somewhat dubious repute because of spiritualistic tendencies.