"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.