The next morning, Gunpowder was found without his saddle. The horse was quietly eating grass in a field near Hans Van Ripper’s farm. But there was no news of Ichabod Crane.
Ichabod’s pupils waited at the schoolhouse all morning. But the schoolmaster did not come. The boys and girls were happy to miss their lessons. They ate apples and they played on the grass near the river.
By the afternoon, Hans Van Ripper began to worry about Ichabod.
“What’s happened to him?” he asked himself. “And where’s my saddle?”
Hans Van Ripper went to find some men from the village.
“The schoolmaster has disappeared,” he told them. “We must try to find him.”
The men looked for Ichabod for a long time, but they could not find him. At last, they went to the old church by the bridge. They found some marks in the road. They were the marks made by two horses. The marks continued across the bridge, then they disappeared in the grass.
“Look!” said one of the men suddenly. “There’s the schoolmaster’s hat.”
Ichabod’s hat was on the road near the bridge. Beside the hat, there was a very large, soft pumpkin. The big round, yellow fruit was about the size of a man’s head. It was broken.
The water in the river was very black and deep near the bridge. Hans Van Ripper looked at it sadly.
“Ichabod couldn’t swim,” he said. “Perhaps he fell off my horse and drowned in the deep water. We’ll look for his body in the river. But why is that pumpkin here? It’s very strange.”
The men looked in the river, but they could not find Ichabod. Al last, they all went home. Later in the day, Hans Van Ripper searched through Ichabod’s things. The schoolmaster had owned two shirts, two pairs of shoes, one pair of pants, a very old book of psalms, and a book of stories about ghosts and spirits. Hans also found some poems about Katrina Van Tassel which Ichabod had written. None of these poems was finished.
Hans Van Ripper immediately threw the poems and the book of ghost stories into his kitchen fire.
“I’m never going to send my children to school again,” he said to his wife. “They don’t learn anything good there. They learn about ghosts and spirits and they learn foolish poetry.”
________
Soon, everybody in Sleepy Hollow had heard the story of Ichabod Crane’s strange disappearance. People could not stop talking about it. What had happened to Ichabod?
Groups of people met together at the bridge by the little church. They pointed at the place where the schoolmaster’s hat had been found. They remembered the stories about the Headless Horseman.
“Do you remember old Farmer Brouwer’s story?” one of them asked. “And Brom Bones’s story too? They both met the Headless Horseman on this road. But he left them at the bridge. Perhaps Ichabod Crane met the Horseman too. Perhaps the Horseman captured him and carried him away.”
Ichabod had no family, and he did not owe money to anybody. So the people of Sleepy Hollow forgot about him quickly. Soon, another teacher came to take Ichabod’s place.
________
What really happened to Ichabod Crane? The old woman of Sleepy Hollow knew the answer – they were sure of that. They often told the story of Ichabod when they sat by their fires on cold winter evenings.
“Ichabod Crane was taken away by the Headless Horseman,” they said. “Nobody has seen him since that night. Nobody will ever see him again.”
People became very afraid of the bridge near the church. They said, “This place is haunted by Ichabod’s ghost. His ghost haunts the schoolhouse too. Some people have heard a voice singing strange songs and psalms there.”
On quiet summer evenings, people did sometimes hear strange sounds near the schoolhouse.
“Listen! Ichabod Crane is singing again,” they said. “Or is it only Brom Bones’s old dog?”
But there was another story about Ichabod Crane. Many years after Ichabod’s disappearance, a farmer from Sleepy Hollow went to New York City. When he came back, he brought some very strange news.
“Ichabod Crane is alive,” the farmer said. “I saw him in New York. I talked to him. He’s a lawyer there. He’s earning a lot of money.”
“What do you mean?” asked another man. “Ichabod Crane is dead. He was taken away by the Headless Horseman.”
“No,” said he farmer. “He left Sleepy Hollow secretly – he told me that himself. He was afraid of the Headless Horseman. And he was afraid of Han Van Ripper, because he’d lost Hans’s best saddle. He was also very angry, because Katrina Van Tassel had been unkind to him. So he did not want to stay here any more.
“Ichabod went to New York and taught in a school there,” the farmer went on. “But he wanted to become a lawyer. So he studied law in the evenings.”
“Is this man’s story true?” the people of the valley asked each other. “Is Ichabod Crane really still alive?”
Perhaps only one person in the area knew the truth about Ichabod.
Soon after the schoolmaster disappeared, Brom Bones married Katrina Van Tassel. They were very happy together and they had many children. Whenever people talked about Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones always laughed loudly. He laughed loudest when they talked about the broken pumpkin.
Sometimes Brom’s friends asked him about the night of the party.
“Do you know what really happened to the schoolmaster, Brom?” they said. “Please tell us!”
But Brom only laughed louder. Did he know what really happened that night? Did he know a secret about Ichabod and the Headless Horseman? Perhaps he did!
The end