And already after a few weeks the animal’s condition improved: gradually the rough hair vanished; a smooth, blue-spotted skin appeared, and one day when he led it round on the place, it walked nimbly on its steady legs. Hauke thought of the adventurous seller. “That fellow was a fool, or a knave who had stolen it,” he murmured to himself. Then soon, when the horse merely heard his footsteps, it threw back its head and neighed to greet him; and now he saw too that it had, what the Arabs demand of a good horse, a spare face, out of which two fiery brown eyes were gleaming. He would lead it into its stable and put a light saddle on it; and scarcely did he sit on the saddle, when the animal uttered a neigh like a shout of delight. It sped away with him, down the hill to the road and then to the dike; but the rider sat securely, and when they had reached the top, it went more quietly, easily, as if dancing, and thrust its head to the side of the sea. He patted and stroked its smooth neck, but it no longer needed these endearments, the horse seemed altogether to be one with the rider, and after he had ridden a distance northwards out on the dike, he turned it easily and reached the farm again.

The men stood at the foot of the hill and waited for the return of their master. “Now, John,” he cried, as he leaped down from his horse. “you ride it to the fens where the others are; it’ll carry you like a cradle.”

The white horse shook its head and neighed aloud over the sunny marshes, while the hired man was taking off the saddle and the boy ran with it to the harness-room; then it laid its head on its master’s shoulder and suffered him to caress it. But when the hired man wanted to swing himself on its back, it leaped to the side with a sudden bound and then stood motionless, turning its beautiful eyes on its master. “Hallo, Iven,” cried Hauke, “has he hurt you?” and he tried to help his man up from the ground.

The latter was busily rubbing his hip: “No, sir, I can manage still; but let the devil ride that white horse!”

“And me!” Hauke added, laughing. “Then bring him to the fens by the bridle.”

“And when the man obeyed, somewhat humiliated, the white horse meekly let itself be led.

A few evenings later the man and the boy stood together in front of the stable door. The sunset gleam had vanished behind the dike, the land it enclosed was already wrapped in twilight; only at rare intervals from far off one could hear the lowing of a startled bull or the scream of a lark whose life was ending through the assault of a weasel or a water rat. The man was leaning against the doorpost and smoking his short pipe, from which he could no longer see the smoke; he and the boy had not yet talked together. Something weighed on the boy’s soul, however, but he did not know how to begin with the silent man. “Iven,” he said finally, “you know that horse skeleton on Jeverssand.”

“What about it?” asked the man.

“Yes, Iven, what about it? It isn’t there any more—neither by day nor by moonlight; I’ve run up to the dike about twenty times.”

“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.

“Well, yes,” said an old dike overseer, “here we have the whole business now, and protests won’t do any good, because the dikemaster general patronises our dikemaster.”

“You’re right, Detlev Wiens,” added a second; “our spring work is waiting, and now a dike miles long is to be made—then everything will have to be left undone.”

  “You can finish all that this year,” said Hauke; “things don’t move as fast as that.”

Few wanted to admit that. “But your profile,” said a third, bringing up something new; “the dike will be as broad on the outside toward the water as other things are long. Where shall we get the material? When shall the work be done?”

“If not this year, then next year; that will depend chiefly on ourselves,” said Hauke.

Angry laughter passed along the whole company. “But what is all that useless labor for? The dike isn’t supposed to be any bigger than the old one;” cried a new voice; “and I’m sure that’s stood for over thirty years.”

“You are right,” said Hauke, “thirty years ago the old dike broke; then backwards thirty-five years ago, and again forty-five years ago; but since then, although it is still standing steep and senseless, the highest floods have spared us.