"The old bones have tumbled to pieces, I suppose," said Iven and calmly smoked on.
"But I was out there by moonlight, too; nothing is moving over there on Jeverssand, either!"
"Why, yes!" said the man, "if the bones have fallen apart, it won't be able to get up any more."
"Don't joke, Iven! I know now; I can tell you where it is."
The man turned to him suddenly: "Well, where is it, then?"
"Where?" repeated the boy emphatically. "It is standing in our stable; there it has been standing, ever since it was no more on the island. It isn't for nothing that our master always feeds it himself; I know about it, Iven."
For a while the man puffed away violently into the night. "You're not right in your mind, Carsten," he said then; "our white horse? If ever a horse was alive, that one is. How can a wide-awake youngster like you get mixed up with such an old wives' belief!"
But the boy could not be converted: if the devil was inside the white horse, why shouldn't it be alive? On the contrary, it was all the worse. He started, frightened, every time that he stepped into the stable toward night, where the creature was sometimes kept in summer and it turned its fiery head toward him so violently. "The devil take you!" he would mutter; "we won't stay together much longer!"
So he secretly looked round for a new place, gave notice and, about All Saints' Day, went to Ole Peters as hired man. Here he found attentive listeners for his story of the dikemaster's devil's horse. Fat Mrs. Vollina and her dull-witted father, the former dike overseer, Jess Harders, listened in smug horror and afterwards told it to all who had a grudge against the dikemaster in their hearts or who took pleasure in that kind of thing.
In the mean time already at the end of March the order to begin on the new dike had arrived from the dikemaster general. Hauke first called the dike overseers together, and in the inn up by the church they had all appeared one day and listened while he read to them the main points from the documents that had been drawn up so far: points from his petition from the report of the dikemaster general, and lastly the final order in which, above all, the outline which he had proposed was accepted, so that the new dike should not be steep like the old ones, but slant gradually toward the sea. But they did not listen with cheerful or even satisfied faces.