Traveller Read Free

do. Sure, I’ve seed you and young Baxter playing around in the yard, jumping on the leaves and chasing each other an’ all the rest of it. First of all I used to play with my dam—Flora, she was called—nibbling her tail, bumping her around. She took it all easy—well, she knowed I’d soon be off to play with the other foals, kicking around, pulling faces and swishing tails. You’ve gotta larn to get on with other horses, else you end up worse’n Richmond. Well, I ain’t told you ‘bout Richmond, Tom, have I? I will, sometime.
    It was all through playing that I larned not to be afraid of men. ‘Course, the men fed us in the cold weather, and combed us down, and took the older horses out to ride and all that. Men need horses same’s they need dogs and cats. Without horses they couldn’t get around. Without dogs they couldn’t have cows or sheep, and I guess they’d all be robbing each other, too, with no dogs to bark for ‘em. Without you cats the rats’d have every durned thing—oats, bran—the lot.
    How
did we play, did you say? My golly, I never realized then—well, ‘course I didn’t—the luck it was for me to be raised and trained the way I was! Since then I’ve seed that many young horses beaten and ill-treated—spirits broken, tempers spoiled—all on ‘count o’ what some men call training. They figure they’ve got to show the horse who’s master—whips, spurs, hard words—until he’s been driven jest about mad. And then they’ll turn around an’ say he’s natcherly vicious! The Army—the Army was full of it; Marse Robert hisself was forever telling men not to whip their horses. But once a horse has been spoiled it’s jest about too late, you see. There’s no listening no more, no signals, no watching out either way.
    Jim coming to play—well, I don’t recollect ‘zackly when he started, but I s’pose it might have been the summer after I was born—that or the next; I don’t rightly recall. I know it was after they cut me between the legs, but I don’t remember much about that neither; not after all this time. I can recall being throwed and held down. That was bad, and it hurt some, but anyhow it healed up quick.
    The men used to lean over the fence, chatting an’ lazing around, easy; they’d chew tobacco an’ watch us foals playing together. The way I figure it now, they was sizing up a whole lot that way: which of us was timid, which was lazy, or ‘quisitive, or heading to turn out steady—all that sort o’ thing. ‘Course, in them days it never crossed my mind.
    I remember, one day, there was six or seven of us herded off into another big field next to the one we’d growed up in. There we was, all larking around, hightailing, playing follow-the-leader, bumping each other and all the rest of it—having a high old time. An’ then all of a sudden there was this young fella—Jim, they called him—I came to know later he was the boss’s son—he jest came right on into the field an’ sat hisself down on a log. I was kinda leery; I was wondering what he reckoned to do, but he never did nothing at all—not all the afternoon. He jest sat there, an’ ‘bout sunset he went off again. Next day it was the same; and the next. Sometimes he was sitting a-chewing tobacco, and sometimes he was jest whittling away at a stick with his knife, or tossing bits of bread to the sparrows an’ the juncos. ‘Seemed to have jest about as much time for doing nothing as a horse.
    In the end I got kinda ‘quisitive ‘bout him—you know, wondering why he was there. So I quit playing with the others and wandered over to him. He never took no notice. Finally I went right up to him and smelt him over. He never moved: jest raised one of his arms, after a bit, real slow, and began