"I would have made the fire for Mrs. Antis, only I couldn't get in," said Eben as Mr. Antis met him on the door-step. "I have been here some time."
"Time enough, my boy. Mrs. Antis is only just up. You may make the fire now, and finish the horses afterwards. You seem to understand how to go to work with them."
"Yes, my father always let me take the care of poor Fancy," said Eben, with just a little huskiness in his voice at the thought of the beautiful "Morgan," his own particular property which had gone with the rest of Mr. Fairchild's stock. "I love horses dearly, they are such knowing, willing creatures. It seems too bad the way they are abused sometimes. I don't see how any one can abuse a dumb beast."
"I am glad you feel so, and I quite agree with you, Eben. I would never keep a boy that I found abusing or overdriving a horse or cow."
"I don't believe he will keep Tom Wilbur long, then," was Eben's thought, but he did not express it. Before he went home to his breakfast, he had fed the horses, milked, brought in wood for the day, swept off the walk, and put on a kettle of dish-water. Mrs. Antis smiled when she came across this proof of the boy's thoughtfulness.
"I hardly ever had a girl who would remember to do that," she said to her husband. "But I must not count too much on Eben, for I know that just as surely as he shows himself good for anything, you will be for getting him away from me."
There was not a little talk among Mrs. Fairchild's friends and Eben's former schoolmates when it was discovered that Eben had really gone to work, not in the mill, which was considered a very good place, but as Mr. Antis's "hired boy." Some people wondered how Mrs. Fairchild could allow such a thing, and Mrs. Badger said Anne Fairchild never would have thought of it, if the boy had been her own.
"Mr. Fairchild always considered Eben the same as his own," said her daughter, "and Flora thinks there is nobody in all the world like Eben."
"Yes, but then you see Eben isn't their own flesh and blood. It speaks well for the boy, anyhow, after his expecting to be Mr. Fairchild's heir, and to go to college, and what not."
"I wonder Mr. Antis didn't take him into the mill instead of Tom Wilbur," said Mrs. Badger, junior. "Tom ain't no more account than a towstring."