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
man my father had been. Life and business matters had hitherto been much
a sealed book for me. I was seized of consternation when a man came
riding over from the little Wallingford bank, asking attention to word
from Abrams & Halliday, bankers of Fredericksburg. I understood vaguely
of notes overdue, and somewhat of mortgages on our lands, our house, our
crops. I explained our present troubles and confusion; but the messenger
shook his head with a coldness on his face I had not been accustomed to
see worn by any at Cowles' Farms. Sweat stood on my face when I saw that
we owed over fifteen thousand dollars--a large sum in those simple