“Father,” said Albert with resolution in his voice, “I’ll train Joey—I’ll train him to plow all right—but you must promise never to raise a whip to him again. He can’t be handled that way. I know him, Father, I know him as if he were my own brother.”

“You train him, Albert, you handle him. Don’t care how you do it. I don’t want to know,” said his father dismissively. “I’ll never go near the brute again. I’d shoot him first.”

But when Albert came into the stable, it was not to soothe me as he usually did nor to talk to me gently. Instead he walked up to me and looked me hard in the eye. “That was plain stupid,” he said sternly. “If you want to survive, Joey, you’ll have to learn.”