I understood it then; our sweet mistress was dead.
The year following was a dreary irritating one, and yet better than its successors. The boys grew perfectly lawless, save when their uncle Dick spoke. Dr. Fred drank a good deal "to drown trouble," he said. Bob and my master only remained unchanged.
Mrs. Fred had been dead one year and nine days when Fred brought home another wife. She was so different from the first one, and so silly, it seemed to me. I had not forgotten my mistress and I wondered if her husband had. Dr. Dick told me again and again that it was "a perfect shame!" and Bob made faces at her back. Chet and Carm—mimicking their father, tone and all—called her "my dear;" and, when bidden to call her mother, replied that their mother was dead. She became furious before she had been Mrs. Wallace a week. Her husband sided with her, and there was one continual row. After her "bridish sweetness"—as Bob called it—wore off, she was quite able to hold her own, and either flogged the boys herself, or had Dr. Fred do it, every day. Often, when the latter was intoxicated, my master had to interfere to save the children from being maimed.
All that was evil in those two boys grew and flourished; all that was good withered and, apparently, died. They grew cruel and unjust to us horses, but for all that, I pitied them, especially Carm.
By spring Mrs. Wallace had tormented her husband into the notion of selling out there in K—— and removed to M——, the growing little city from which she came. Further, she turned Bob off, and installed her brother Parker in his place.
We horses used to talk the changes over sorrowfully, and wonder if she would manage anyway to get Dr. Dick out of the way.
The night before Bob left, he and Master were talking in the barn.
"I would stay here and let them go by themselves," the latter said, "but Fred can't get along without me; he is not himself all the time, and I feel so badly for poor Nannie's boys; in fact, I promised her to stay with Fred and do the best I could by him. I'll stick by him. Life is nothing to me anyway, only as I can help some person or thing."
I know he found Bob a good place, but it was a sorry day for us when Park Winters became hired boy at the Wallace stables.
Well, we all moved to M——.