‘Suppose the boy with the bad grandfather had a good grandmother, Ichabod?’
‘None of the Mountain lot ever had,’ Ichabod replied. There was no item in Ichabod’s creed more fixed than this—the Mountains of Mountain Farm were hateful and contemptible. He had imbibed the belief with his mother’s milk and his father’s counsel. His grandfather had known it for the one cardinal certainty of nature.
Just as the serving-men of Capulet hated the serving-men of Montague, so the oldest servants of the Mountains hated the older servants of the Reddys. The men made the masters’ quarrel their own. There was a feudal spirit in the matter, and half the fights of this outlying district of the parish were provoked by that ancient history of the brook. At this time of day it mattered very little indeed if the history was true or false, for neither proof nor disproof was possible, and the real mischief was done past remedy in any case.
‘Are you sure our side fought for Cromwell, Ichabod?’ Master Richard. asked, after another long and thoughtful silence.
‘To be sure,’ said Ichabod.
‘I don’t think it can be true, then, about the brook,’ said the boy, ‘because Cromwell won, and everybody who was on his side had their own way. Mr. Greenfell teaches history at school, and he says so.’
This was nothing to Ichabod, whose intellect was not constructed for the reception of historical evidences.
‘Then ax thy feyther, Master Richard,’ he answered; ‘he’ll tell thee the rights on it.’
The boy walked on pondering, as children of his age will do. The seniors would be surprised pretty often if they could guess how deep and far the young thoughts go, but, then, the seniors have forgotten their own young days, or were never of a thinking habit. Ichabod clamped along with his mind on beer. The boy thought his own thoughts, and each was indifferent for a while to outer signs and sounds. But suddenly a little girl ran round a corner of the devious lane with a brace of young savages in pursuit. The youthful savages had each an armful of snowballs, and they were pelting the child with more animus than seemed befitting. The very tightness with which the balls were pressed seemed to say that they were bent less on sport than mischief, and they came whooping and dancing round the corner with such rejoicing cruelty as only boys or uncivilised men can feel. The little girl was sobbing, half in distress, and half because of the haste she had made, and Master Richard’s juvenile soul burnt within him at the sight like that of a knight-errant. He had read a great deal about knights-errant for the time which had been as yet allowed him for the pursuit of literature, and he was by nature a boy of much fire and gentleness, and a very sympathetic imagination. So the big heart in the small body swelled with pity and grew hot with valour, and, without parley, he smote the foremost boy, who happened to be the bigger of the two, and went headlong into fight with him.
Ichabod followed the young master’s lead without knowing, or in the smallest degree caring, why, and tried to seize the smaller savage, who skilfully evaded him and ran. The little maiden stood and trembled with clasped hands as she looked upon the fray. Ichabod lifted his smock-frock to get his hands into the pockets of his corduroys, and watched with the air of an old artist standing behind a young one.