road one day about three years after his memorable meeting with the
Grand Occidental. On his way across the city to Norumbega Market he
found his way blocked by a line of waiting people. From an urchin-tossed
handbill, Uncle Enoch learned that the Grandest Aggregation was in town
and that "the Unparalleled Street Pageant" was about due. So he waited.
With grim enjoyment Uncle Enoch watched the brilliant spectacle
impassively. Old Jeff merely pricked up his ears in curious interest as
the procession moved along in its dazzling course.
"Zaretti, Bareback Queen of the World! On her Famous Arabian Steed
Abdullah! Presented to her by the Shah of Persia!"
Thus read Uncle Enoch as he followed the printed order of parade with
toil-grimed forefinger.
For a moment Uncle Enoch's gaze was held by the Bareback Queen, who
looked languidly into space over the top of the tiger cage. Then he
stared hard at the "far-famed Arabian steed," gift of the impulsive
Shah. Said steed was caparisoned in a gorgeous saddle-blanket hung with
silver fringe. A silver-mounted martingale dangled between his knees.
Holding the silk-tasselled bridle rein, and walking in respectful
attendance, was a groom in tight-fitting riding breeches and a cockaded
hat which rested mainly on his ears. The horse was of white, mottled
with carrot-red in such striking pattern that, having once seen it, one
could hardly forget.
"Gee whilikins!" said Uncle Enoch softly to himself, as if fearful of
betraying some newly discovered secret.
But Old Jeff was moved to no such reticence. Lifting his head over the
shoulders of the crowd he pointed his ears and gave vent to a quick,
glad whinny of recognition. The "far-famed Arabian," turning so sharply
that the unwary groom was knocked sprawling, looked hard at the humble
farm-horse, and then, with an answering high-pitched neigh, dashed
through the quickly scattering spectators.
It was a moment of surprises. The Bareback Queen of the World was
startled out of her day-dream to find her "Arabian steed" rubbing noses
with a ragged-coated horse hitched to a battered farm-wagon, in which
sat a chin-whiskered old fellow who grinned expansively and slyly winked
at her over the horses' heads.
"It's all right, ma'am, I won't let on," he said.
Before she could reply, the groom, who had rescued his cockaded hat and
his presence of mind, rushed in and dragged the far-famed steed back
into the line of procession.
"Wall, I swan to man, ef Old Jeff didn't know that air Calicker afore I
did," declared Uncle Enoch, as he described the affair to Aunt
Henrietta; "an' me that raised him from a colt. I do swan to man!"
Mlle. Zaretti did not "swan to man," whatever that may be, but to this
day she marvels concerning the one and only occasion when her trusted
Calico disturbed the progress of the Grandest Aggregation's unparalleled
street pageant.
OLD SILVER
A STORY OF THE GRAY HORSE TRUCK
Down in the heart of the skyscraper district, keeping watch and ward
over those presumptuous, man-made cliffs around which commerce heaps its
Fundy tides, you will find, unhandsomely housed on a side street, a hook
and ladder company, known unofficially and intimately throughout the
department as the Gray Horse Truck.
Much like a big family is a fire company. It has seasons of good
fortune, when there are neither sick leaves nor hospital cases to
report; and it has periods of misfortune, when trouble and disaster
stalk abruptly through the ranks. Gray Horse Truck company is no
exception. Calm prosperity it has enjoyed, and of swift, unexpected
tragedy it has had full measure. Yet its longest mourning and most
sincere, was when it lost Old Silver.
Although some of the men of Gray Horse Truck had seen more than ten
years' continuous service in the house, not one could remember a time
when Old Silver had not been on the nigh side of the poles. Mikes and
Petes and Jims there had been without number. Some were good and some
were bad, some had lasted years and some only months, some had been kind
and some ugly, some stupid and some clever; but there had been but one
Silver, who had combined all their good traits as well as many of their
bad ones.
Horses and men, Silver had seen them come and go. He had seen
probationers rise step by step to battalion and deputy chiefs, win
shields and promotion or meet the sudden fate that is their lot. All
that time Silver's name-board had swung over his old stall, and when the
truck went out Silver was to be found in his old place on the left of
the poles. Driver succeeded driver, but one and all they found Silver
first under the harness when a station hit, first to jump forward when
the big doors rolled back, and always as ready to do his bit on a long
run as he was to demand his four quarts when feeding-time came.
Before the days of the Training Stable, where now they try out new
material, Silver came into the service. That excellent institution,
therefore, cannot claim the credit of his selection. Perhaps he was
chosen by some shrewd old captain, who knew a fire-horse when he saw
one, even in the raw; perhaps it was only a happy chance which put him
in the business. At any rate, his training was the work of a master
hand.
Silver was not one of the fretting kind, so at the age of fifteen he was
apple-round, his legs were straight and springy, and his eyes as full
and bright as those of a school-boy at a circus. The dapples on his gray
flanks were as distinct as the under markings on old velours, while his
tail had the crisp whiteness of a polished steel bit on a frosty
morning. Unless you had seen how shallow were his molar cups or noted
the length of his bridle teeth, would you have guessed him not more than
six.
As for the education of Silver, its scope and completeness, no outsider
would have given credence to the half of it. When Lannigan had driven
the truck for three years, and had been cronies with Silver for nearly
five, it was his habit to say, wonderingly:
"He beats me, Old Silver does. I git onto some new wrinkle of his every
day. No; 'taint no sorter use to tell his tricks; you wouldn't believe,
nor would I an' I hadn't seen with me two eyes."
In the way of mischief Silver was a star performer. What other
fire-horse ever mastered the intricacies of the automatic halter
release? It was Silver, too, that picked from the Captain's hip-pocket a
neatly folded paper and chewed the same with malicious enthusiasm. The
folded paper happened to be the Company's annual report, in the writing
of which the Captain had spent many weary hours.
Other things besides mischief however, had Silver learned. Chief of
these was to start with the jigger. Sleeping or waking, lying or
standing, the summons that stirred the men from snoring ease to tense,
rapid action, never failed to find Silver alert. As the halter shank
slipped through the bit-ring that same instant found Silver gathered
for the rush through the long narrow lane leading from his open stall to
the poles, above which, like great couchant spiders, waited the
harnesses pendant on the hanger-rods. It was unwise to be in Silver's
way when that little brazen voice was summoning him to duty. More than
one man of Gray Horse Truck found that out.
Once under the harness Silver was like a carved statue until the
trip-strap had been pulled, the collar fastened and the reins snapped
in. Then he wanted to poke the poles through the doors, so eager was he
to be off. It was no fault of Silver's that his team could not make a
two-second hitch.
With the first strain at the traces his impatience died out. A
sixty-foot truck starts with more or less reluctance. Besides, Silver
knew that before anything like speed could be made it was necessary
either to mount the grade to Broadway or to ease the machine down to
Greenwich Street. It was traces or backing-straps for all that was in
you, and at the end a sharp turn which never could have been made had
not the tiller-man done his part with the rear wheels.
But when once the tires caught the car-tracks Silver knew what to
expect. At the turn he and his team mates could feel Lannigan gathering
in the reins as though for a full stop. Next came the whistle of the
whip. It swept across their flanks so quickly that it was practically
one stroke for them all. At the same moment Lannigan leaned far forward
and shot out his driving arm. The reins went loose, their heads went
forward and, as if moving on a pivot, the three leaped as one horse.
Again the reins tightened for a second, again they were loosened. When
the bits were pulled back up came three heads, up came three pairs of
shoulders and up came three pairs of forelegs; for at the other end of
the lines, gripped vice-like in Lannigan's big fist, was swinging a good
part of Lannigan's one hundred and ninety-eight pounds.
Left to themselves each horse would have leaped at a different instant.
It was that one touch of the lash and the succeeding swing of Lannigan's
bulk which gave them the measure, which set the time, which made it
possible for less than four thousand pounds of horse-flesh to jump a
five-ton truck up the street at a four-minute clip.
For Silver all other minor pleasures in life were as nothing to the
fierce joy he knew when, with a dozen men clinging to the hand-rails,
the captain pulling the bell-rope and Lannigan, far up above them all,
swaying on the lines, the Gray Horse Truck swept up Broadway to a first
call-box.
It was like trotting to music, if you've ever done that. Possibly you
could have discovered no harmony at all in the confused roar of the
apparatus as it thundered past. But to the ears of Silver there were
many sounds blended into one. There were the rhythmical beat of hoofs,
the low undertone of the wheels grinding the pavement, the high note of
the forged steel lock-opener as it hammered the foot-board, the mellow
ding-dong of the bell, the creak of the forty-and fifty-foot extensions,
the rattle of the iron-shod hooks, the rat-tat-tat of the scaling
ladders on the bridge and the muffled drumming of the leather helmets as
they jumped in the basket.
With the increasing speed all these sounds rose in pitch until, when the
team was at full-swing, they became one vibrant theme--thrilling,
inspiring, exultant--the action song of the Truck.
To enjoy such music, to know it at its best, you must leap in the
traces, feel the swing of the poles, the pull of the whiffle-trees, the
slap of the trace-bearers; and you must see the tangled street-traffic
clear before you as if by the wave of a magician's wand.
Of course it all ended when, with heaving flanks and snorting nostrils
you stopped before a building, where thin curls of smoke escaped from
upper windows. Generally you found purring beside a hydrant a shiny
steamer which had beaten the truck by perhaps a dozen seconds. Then you
watched your men snatch the great ladders from the truck, heave them up
against the walls and bring down pale-faced, staring-eyed men and women.
You saw them tear open iron shutters, batter down doors, smash windows
and do other things to make a path for the writhing, white-bodied,
yellow-nosed snakes that uncoiled from the engine and were carried
wriggling in where the flames lapped along baseboard and floor-beams.
You saw the little ripples of smoke swell into huge, cream-edged billows
that tumbled out and up so far above that you lost sight of them.
Sometimes there came dull explosions, when smoke and flame belched out
about you. Sometimes stones and bricks and cornices fell near you. But
you were not to flinch or stir until Lannigan, who watched all these
happenings with critical and unwinking eyes, gave the word.
And after it was all over--when the red and yellow flames had ceased to
dance in the empty window spaces, when only the white steam-smoke rolled
up through the yawning roof-holes--the ladders were re-shipped, you left
the purring engines to drown out the last hidden spark, and you went
prancing back to your House, where the lonesome desk-man waited
patiently for your return.
No loping rush was the homeward trip. The need for haste had passed. Now
came the parade. You might toss your head, arch your neck, and use all
your fancy steps: Lannigan didn't care. In fact, he rather liked to have
you show off a bit. The men on the truck, smutty of face and hands,
joked across the ladders. The strain was over. It was a time of
relaxing, for behind was duty well done.
Then came the nice accuracy of swinging a sixty-foot truck in a
fifty-foot street and of backing through a fourteen-foot door wheels
which spanned thirteen feet from hub rim to hub rim.
After unhooking there was the rubbing and the extra feeding of oats that
always follows a long run. How good it was to be bedded down after this
lung stretching, leg limbering work.
Such was the life which Old Silver was leading when there arrived
disaster. It came in the shape of a milk leg. Perhaps it was caused by
over-feeding, but more likely it resulted from much standing in stall
during a fortnight when the runs had been few and short.
It behaved much as milk legs usually do. While there was no great pain
the leg was unhandsome to look upon, and it gave to Old Silver a
clumsiness of movement he had never known before.
Industriously did Lannigan apply such simple remedies as he had at hand.
Yet the swelling increased until from pastern to hock was neither shape
nor grace. Worst of all, in getting on his feet one morning, Silver
barked the skin with a rap from his toe calks. Then it did look bad. Of
course this had to happen just before the veterinary inspector's
monthly visit.
"Old Silver, eh?" said he. "Well, I've been looking for him to give out.
That's a bad leg there, a very bad leg. Send him up to the hospital in
the morning, and I'll have another gray down here. It's time you had a
new horse in his place."
Lannigan stepped forward to protest. It was only a milk leg. He had
cured such before. He could cure this one. Besides, he couldn't spare
Silver, the best horse on his team.
But the inspector often heard such pleas.
"You drivers," said he, "would keep a horse going until he dropped
through the collar. To hear you talk anyone would think there wasn't
another horse in the Department. What do you care so long as you get
another gray?"
Very much did Lannigan care, but he found difficulty in putting his
sentiments into words. Besides, of what use was it to talk to a blind
fool who could say that one gray horse was as good as another. Hence
Lannigan only looked sheepish and kept his tongue between his teeth
until the door closed behind the inspector. Then he banged a ham-like
fist into a broad palm and relieved his feelings in language both
forceful and picturesque. This failed to mend matters, so Lannigan,
putting an arm around the old gray's neck, told Silver all about it.
Probably Silver misunderstood, for he responded by reaching over
Lannigan's shoulder and chewing the big man's leather belt. Only when
Lannigan fed to him six red apples and an extra quart of oats did Silver
mistrust that something unusual was going to happen. Next morning, sure
enough, it did happen.
Some say Lannigan wept. As to that none might be sure, for he sat facing
the wall in a corner of the bunk-room. No misunderstanding could there
have been about his remarks, muttered though they were. They were
uncomplimentary to all veterinary inspectors in general, and most
pointedly uncomplimentary to one in particular. Below they were leading
Old Silver away to the hospital.
Perhaps it was that Silver's milk leg was stubborn in yielding to
treatment. Perhaps the folks at the horse hospital deemed it unwise to
spend time and effort on a horse of his age. At any rate, after less
than a week's stay, he was cast into oblivion. They took away the leaden
number medal, which for more than ten years he had worn on a strap
around his neck, and they turned him over to a sales-stable as
carelessly as a battalion chief would toss away a half-smoked cigar.
Now a sales-stable is a place where horse destinies are shuffled by
reckless and unthinking hands. Also its doors open on the four corners
of the world's crossed highways. You might go from there to find your
work waiting between the shafts of a baker's cart just around the
corner, or you might be sent across seas to die miserably of tsetse
stings on the South African veldt.
Neither of these things happened to Silver. It occurred that his arrival
at the sales-stable was coincident with a rush order from the Street
Cleaning Department. So there he went. Fate, it seemed, had marked him
for municipal service.
There was no delay about his initiation. Into his forehoofs they branded
this shameful inscription: D. S. C. 937, on his back they flung a
forty-pound single harness with a dirty piece of canvas as a blanket.
They hooked him to an iron dump-cart, and then, with a heavy lashed
whip, they haled him forth at 5.30 a.m. to begin the inglorious work of
removing refuse from the city streets.
Perhaps you think Old Silver could not feel the disgrace, the ignominy
of it all. Could you have seen the lowered head, the limp-hung tail, the
dulled eyes and the dispirited sag of his quarters, you would have
thought differently.
It is one thing to jump a hook and ladder truck up Broadway to the
relief of a fire-threatened block, and quite another to plod humbly
along the curb from ash-can to ash-can. How Silver did hate those cans.
Each one should have been for him a signal to stop. But it was not. In
consequence, he was yanked to a halt every two minutes.
Sometimes he would crane his neck and look mournfully around at the
unsightly leg which he had come to understand was the cause of all his
misery. There would come into his great eyes a look of such pitiful
melancholy that one might almost fancy tears rolling out. Then he would
be roused by an exasperated driver, who jerked cruelly on the lines and
used his whip as if it had been a flail.
When the cart was full Silver must drag it half across the city to the
riverfront, and up a steep runway from the top of which its contents
were dumped into the filthy scows that waited below. At the end of each
monotonous, wearisome day he jogged stiffly to the uninviting stables,
where he was roughly ushered into a dark, damp stall.
To another horse, unused to anything better, the life would not have
seemed hard. Of oats and hay there were fair quantities, and there was
more or less hasty grooming. But to Silver, accustomed to such little
amenities as friendly pats from men, and the comradeship of his
fellow-workers, it was like a bad dream. He was not even cheered by the
fact that his leg, intelligently treated by the stable-boss, was growing
better. What did that matter? Had he not lost his caste? Express and
dray horses, the very ones that had once scurried into side streets at
sound of his hoofs, now insolently crowded him to the curb. When he had
been on the truck Silver had yielded the right of way to none, he had
held his head high; now he dodged and waited, he wore a blind bridle,
and he wished neither to see nor to be seen.
For three months Silver had pulled that hateful refuse chariot about the
streets, thankful only that he traversed a section of the city new to
him. Then one day he was sent out with a new driver whose route lay
along familiar ways. The thing Silver dreaded, that which he had long
feared, did not happen for more than a week after the change.
It came early one morning. He had been backed up in front of a big
office-building where a dozen bulky cans cumbered the sidewalk. The
driver was just lifting one of them to the tail-board when, from far
down the street, there reached Silver's ears a well-known sound. Nearer
it swept, louder and louder it swelled. The old gray lifted his lowered
head in spite of his determination not to look. The driver, too, poised
the can on the cart-edge, and waited, gazing.
In a moment the noise and its cause were opposite. Old Silver hardly
needed to glance before knowing the truth. It was his old company, the
Gray Horse Truck. There was his old driver, there were his old team
mates. In a flash there passed from Silver's mind all memory of his
humble condition, his wretched state. Tossing his head and giving his
tail a swish, he leaped toward the apparatus, neatly upsetting the
filled ash-can over the head and shoulders of the bewildered driver.
By a supreme effort Silver dropped into the old lope. A dozen bounds
took him abreast the nigh horse, and, in spite of Lannigan's shouts,
there he stuck, littering the newly swept pavement most disgracefully at
every jump. Thus strangely accompanied, the Gray Horse Truck thundered
up Broadway for ten blocks, and when it stopped, before a building in
which a careless watchman's lantern had set off the automatic, Old
Silver was part of the procession.
It was Lannigan who, in the midst of an eloquent flow of indignant
abuse, made this announcement: "Why, boys--it's--it's our Old Silver;
jiggered if it ain't!"
Each member of the crew having expressed his astonishment in
appropriate words, Lannigan tried to sum it all up by saying:
"Silver, you old sinner! So they've put you in a blanked ash-cart, have
they? Well, I'll--I'll be----"
But there speech failed him. His wits did not. There was a whispered
council of war. Lannigan made a daring proposal, at which all grinned
appreciatively.
"Sure, they'd never find out," said one.
"An' see, his game leg's most as good as new again," suggested another.
It was an unheard-of, audacious, and preposterous proceeding; one which
the rules and regulations of the Fire Department, many and varied as
they are, never anticipated. But it was adopted. Meanwhile the Captain
found it necessary to inspect the interior of the building, the
Lieutenant turned his back, and the thing was done.
That same evening an ill-tempered and very dirty ash-cart driver turned
up at the stables with a different horse from the one he had driven out
that morning, much to the mystification of himself and certain officials
of the Department of Street Cleaning.
Also, there pranced back as nigh horse of the truck a big gray with one
slightly swollen hind leg. By the way he held his head, by the look in
his big, bright eyes, and by his fancy stepping one might have thought
him glad to be where he was. And it was so. As for the rest, Lannigan
will tell you in strict confidence that the best mode of disguising
hoof-brands until they are effaced by new growth is to fill them with
axle-grease. It cannot be detected.
Should you ever chance to see, swinging up lower Broadway, a
hook-and-ladder truck drawn by three big grays jumping in perfect
unison, note especially the nigh horse--that's the one on the left side
looking forward. It will be Old Silver who, although now rising sixteen,
seems to be good for at least another four years of active service.
BLUE BLAZES
AND THE MARRING OF HIM
Those who should know say that a colt may have no worse luck than to be
foaled on a wet Friday. On a most amazingly wet Friday--rain above,
slush below, and a March snorter roaring between--such was the natal day
of Blue Blazes.
And an unhandsome colt he was. His broomstick legs seemed twice the
proper length, and so thin you would hardly have believed they could
ever carry him. His head, which somehow suggested the lines of a
boot-jack, was set awkwardly on an ewed neck.
For this pitiful, ungainly little figure only two in all the world had
any feeling other than contempt. One of these, of course, was old Kate,
the sorrel mare who mothered him. She gazed at him with sad old eyes
blinded by that maternal love common to all species, sighed with huge
content as he nuzzled for his breakfast, and believed him to be the
finest colt that ever saw a stable. The other was Lafe, the chore boy,
who, when Farmer Perkins had stirred the little fellow roughly with his
boot-toe as he expressed his deep dissatisfaction, made reparation by
gently stroking the baby colt and bringing an old horse-blanket to wrap
him in. Old Kate understood. Lafe read gratitude in the big, sorrowful
mother eyes.
Months later, when the colt had learned to balance himself on the
spindly legs, the old sorrel led him proudly about the pasture, showing
him tufts of sweet new spring grass, and taking him to the brook, where
were tender and juicy cowslips, finely suited to milk-teeth.