"Oh, well, I don't calculate to. Still, you know, my dear, if anybody should want me very much, why, I might go, you know, and it all helps along, and really I do feel ever so much better for the change."
Flora smiled, and agreed that in such a case it would be no more than neighbourly to go, and so the matter rested.
One day Mr. Antis was standing in the mill door, when Eben came up to ask him some questions about the garden. Mr. Antis was looking earnestly down the road, and asked in his turn:
"Eben, is that our team coming down the hill? I am short-sighted."
Eben looked in the same direction. "It is our wagon, I am sure, and that is Tom driving, but those don't look like our horses. Yes, they are, too," he added, hastily, "but what in the world has happened to them?"
When the horses came up they did indeed present a woeful spectacle. They were wet, and covered with mud to their ears, panting and tired to death, and one of them had both knees cut and bleeding.
"Well, I couldn't help it," said Tom, sullenly. "The horses ran away and got into the creek, and I had hard work to get them out."
"Ran away!" said Mr. Antis, in surprise. "How did that happen?"
"I'm sure I don't know; because they are vicious, ugly brutes, I suppose."
"They are neither ugly nor vicious—not half so much as you are," said Jeduthun, who always regarded the "mill" property as his own, and resented any imputation accordingly. "If the horses ran away, it was because you was fooling with them, or didn't tie 'em as you ought."