Tom took the colt back to its place and went into Bucephalus’ box-stall. The stallion was in one of his gentle moods and turned to have his nose rubbed, but Tom went and buried his face against the great black neck and for a long time stood thus, trembling. He had thought perhaps Harry would let him drive Bucephalus in all his races another season and now that was all to come to an end and he was to be pitched back into childhood, to be made just a kid in school. “I won’t do it,” he decided suddenly and a dogged light came into his eyes. His future as a driver of race horses might have to be sacrificed but that didn’t matter so much as the humiliation of this other, and he decided he would say nothing to Harry Whitehead or his wife but would make his own move. “I’ll get out of here. Before they get me into that school I’ll skip out of town,” he told himself as his hand crept up and fondled the soft nose of Bucephalus, the son royal of the Patchens. Tom left Bidwell during the night, going east on a freight train, and no one there ever saw him again. During that winter he lived in the city of Cleveland, where he got work driving a milk wagon in a district where factory workers lived. Then spring came again and with it the memory of other springs—of thunder-showers rolling over fields of wheat, just appearing, green and vivid, out of the black ground—of the sweet smell of new plowed fields, and most of all the smell and sound of animals about barns at the Whitehead farms north of Bidwell. How sharply he remembered those days on the farms and the days later when he lived in Bidwell, slept in the stables and went each morning to jog race horses and young colts round and round the half-mile race track at the fair grounds at Bidwell. That was a life! Round and round the track they went, young colthood and young manhood together, not thinking but carrying life very keenly within themselves and feeling tremendously. The colt’s legs were to be hardened and their wind made sound and for the boy long hours were to be spent in a kind of dream world, and life lived in the company of something fine, courageous, filled with a terrible, waiting surge of life. At the fair ground, away at the town’s edge, tall grass grew in the enclosure inside the track and there were trees from which came the voices of squirrels, chattering and scolding, accompanied by the call of nesting birds and, down below on the ground, by the song of bees visiting early blossoms and of insects hidden away in the grass.