THE next morning I stayed at home to see about getting the stable built
in a hurry, but before I had finished breakfast Millington came over and
said it was an ideal day for a little spin up to Port Lafayette in his
automobile. He said the whole machine was in perfect order and we would
dash out to Port Lafayette, have a bath in the salt water, and come
spinning back, and he told Isobel and me to get on our hats, and he
would have the car before the door in a minute.
Isobel and I hastily finished our coffee and put on our hats and went
out to the gate, for, although we were very eager to build the stable,
we did not like to offend Millington by refusing his invitation, when
he had asked us so often to go to Port Lafayette. In half an hour he
arrived at the gate, and we climbed in.
Our usual custom, on these trips to Port Lafayette, was for Millington
and me to sit in front, while Isobel and Mrs. Millington sat in the
rear. There was a nice little gate in the rear by which they could
enter.
You see, Millington's automobile was just a little old. I should not go
so far as to say it was the first automobile ever made. It was probably
the thirteenth, and Millington was probably the thirteenth owner. I know
it had four cylinders, because Millington was constantly remarking that
only three were working. Sometimes only one worked, and sometimes that
one did not.
When we were all comfortably arranged in our seats, and all snugly
tucked in, Millington cranked the machine for half an hour, and then
remarked regretfully that this was one of the days none of the cylinders
was working, and we got out again.
Mr. Rolfs had come out to see us start, and he helped Millington and
me push the automobile back to the Millington garage; and as I walked
homeward he said he had heard I was going to buy a horse, and he wanted
to give me a little advice.
“Probably you have not given much attention to the subject of
deforestation,” he said, “but I have, and it is the great crime of our
age.”
I told him I did not see what that had to do with my purchasing a horse,
but he said it had everything to do with it.
“When you buy a horse, you have to erect a stable,” he said, “and when
you erect a stable, you have to buy lumber, and when you have to
buy lumber, you suffer in your purse because the forests have been
ruthlessly destroyed. As a friend and neighbour I would not have you go
and purchase poor lumber, and with it build a stable that will rot to
pieces in a few years. You must buy the best lumber, and that is too
expensive to use recklessly. I want to warn you particularly about wire
nails. Do not let your builder use them. They loosen in a short time
and allow the boards to warp and crack. Personally, if I were building
a stable I should have the ends of the boards dovetailed, and instead of
nails I should use ash pegs, but I understand you do not wish to go to
great expense, so screws will do. Let it be part of your contract that
not a nail shall be used in your stable--nothing but screws, and if you
can afford brass screws, so much the better. But remember, no nails!”
I thanked Rolfs, and when Millington came over to invite me to take a
little run up to Port Lafayette the next morning I told him what Mr.
Rolfs had said.
“Now that is just like Rolfs,” he said, “impractical as the day is long.
Screws would not do at all. The carpenters would drive the screws with
a hammer, and the screws would crack the wood. Take my advice and let it
be part of your contract that not a screw is to be used in your stable;
nothing but wire nails. _But_ stipulate long wire nails; wire nails so
long that they will go clear through and clinch on the other side, and
then see that each and every nail is clinched. If you do this you will
have no trouble with split lumber and not a board will work loose.”
When I spoke to the builder about the probable cost of the stable, I was
sorry I had been so lenient with Isobel, and that I had not put my foot
down on the weather vane at once. A weather vane does not add to the
comfort of a family horse, and the longer I spoke with the builder the
surer I became that what I needed was not a lot of gimcracks, but a
plain, simple, story-and-a-half affair, with the chaste architectural
lines of a dry-goods box. I mentioned, casually, the hints Mr. Rolfs
and Mr. Millington had given me, but the builder did not seem very
enthusiastic about them. He snorted in a peculiar way and then said that
if I was going in for that sort of thing I could get better results by
having no nails or screws at all. He said I could have holes bored
in the boards with a gimlet, and have the stable laced together with
rawhide thongs, but that when I got ready to talk business in a sensible
way, I could let him know. He said this was his busy day, and that his
office was not a lunatic asylum.
I managed to calm him in less than half an hour, and he remained quite
docile until I mentioned Isobel and said she hoped he would have the
stable ready for the horse within a week. It took me much longer to calm
him that time. For a few moments I feared for his reason. But he quieted
down.
Then I showed him a plan I had drawn, showing the working of the manure
dump, and this had quite a different effect on him. It pleased him
immensely, as I could see by his face. I explained how it operated; how
throwing a catch allowed one end of the stall floor to drop, while the
other end of the stall floor was held in place by hinges, and he said it
was certainly a new idea. He asked me whether it was Mr. Rolfs's idea
or Mr. Millington's, and when I told him I had worked out the plan
myself, he said he had rather thought so.
“It is just such a plan as I should expect a man of your intelligence to
work out,” he said.
Then he asked to see my bank-book, and when I had shown him just how
much money I had, he said the best way to build the stable was by the
day. If it was built by the job, he explained, a builder naturally had
to hurry the job, and things were not done as carefully as I wished
them done; but if it was done by the day, every hammer stroke would be
carefully made, and I could pay every evening for the work done that
day.
About the third week of the building operations those careful hammer
strokes began to get on my nerves. I never knew hammer strokes so
carefully considered and so cautiously delivered. The carpenters were
most careful about them, and several times I spoke to the builder and
suggested that if shorter nails were used perhaps it would not take
so many strokes of the hammer to drive them in. I told him, if he was
willing, I was willing to have the rest of the stable done by the job,
but he said it had gone too far for that.
There were two men working on my stable--“two souls with but a single
thought,” Isobel called them--and they were hard thinkers. The two of
them would take hold of a board, one at either end, and hold it in
their hands, and look at it, and think. I do not know what they thought
about--deforestation, probably--but they would think for ten minutes
and then put the board gently to one side and think about another board.
They did their thinking, as they did their work, by the day.
[Illustration: 77]
We had plenty of time in which to select our horse while our stable was
building. My advertisement in the local paper brought a horse to my door
the morning after it appeared, and no horse could have suited me quite
so well as that one, but I was resolute and firm. I told the man--he was
not a dealer nor yet a commuter, and my conversation with him showed me
that he knew just enough, and not too much, about horses--that I liked
his horse very well indeed, but that I could not purchase it.. At
this he seemed downcast, and I did not blame him. He seemed to take my
refusal as some sort of personal insult, for the horse was young, large,
strong, gentle, and speedy, and the price was right; but every time
I began to weaken Isobel said, “John, remember number eleven!” and I
refrained from purchasing that horse. I finally sent the man away with
warm expressions of my esteem for him as a man, but that did not seem to
cheer him much.
An hour later another man brought another horse, and I sent him away
also, as was my duty, for he was only number two; but he was hardly gone
when horse number one appeared again. I saw at once that I was going
to have trouble with that man. He was so sure he had the horse I wanted
that he would not go away and stay away. He kept coming back, and each
time he went away sadder than before. He was a sad-looking man, anyway,
and he would sit in his buggy and talk to me until another horse was
driven up, and then he would sigh and drive down to the corner, and sit
and look at me reproachfully until the other man drove away again. Then
he would drive back and reproach me, with tears in his eyes, for not
buying his horse. By lunch time I was almost worn out, and I told Isobel
as much when I looked out of the window and saw that handsome horse and
his sad driver waiting patiently at my gate. I told her I was tempted to
take that horse, Mrs. Rolfs or no Mrs. Rolfs.
“Take that horse?” said Isobel, as if my words surprised her. “Why, of
course we are going to take that horse!”
“But, my dear,” I said, “after what you told me about taking the
eleventh horse?”
“Certainly,” said Isobel. “What is this but the eleventh horse? It came
first, and then another horse came, and then this one came third, and
then some other horse came, and then this one came fifth, and so on, and
now it is standing there at the gate, the eleventh horse. Certainly we
will buy this horse.”
“Isobel,” I said, “we might quite as well have bought it the first time
it was driven to our gate as this time.”
“Not at all,” she said; “that would have been an altogether different
thing. If we had taken the first horse that was offered we would have
regretted it all our lives; but now we can take this horse and feel
perfectly safe.”
Bob--that was the name of the horse--fitted into our stable pretty well.
He had to bend rather sharply in the middle to get out of his stall, but
he was quite limber for a horse of his age and size, so he managed
it very well. A stiffer horse might have broken in two or have been
permanently bent. The stall was so economically built that a large,
long horse like Bob stuck out of it like a long ship in a short dock; he
stuck out so far that we had to go around through the carriage room to
get on the other side of him. Our new Mr. Prawley did not mind this. He
was willing to spend all the time necessary going from one bit of work
to another.
There was one advantage in having the stable and everything about it on
a small scale--it lessened the depth of the manure pit. The very first
night we put Bob in his stall we heard a loud noise in the stable.
Isobel suggested that we had overfed Bob, and that he had swelled out
and pressed out the sides of the stable, but I thought it more likely
that the weather-boarding had slipped loose. I had seen the thoughtful
carpenters putting that weather-boarding on the stable. But Isobel and I
were both wrong. Bob had merely dropped into the manure pit.
I was glad then that I had chosen a strong horse, for he did not seem
to mind the drop in the least. He stood there with his front feet in the
basement, as you might say, and with his rear feet upstairs, quite as
if that was his usual way of standing. After that he often fell into the
manure pit, and he always took it good-naturedly. He got so he expected
it, after awhile, and if his stall floor did not drop once a day, he
became restless and took no interest in his food. Usually, during the
day, Bob and Mr. Prawley dropped into the basement together while Mr.
Prawley was currying Bob, but at night, when we heard Bob calling us in
the homesick, whinnying tone, and kicking his heels against the side
of the stable, we knew what he wanted, and to prevent him kicking the
stable to ruins, we--Isobel and I--would go out and drop him into the
basement a couple of times. Then he would be satisfied.
There was but one thing we feared: Bob might become so fond of having
his forefeet in the basement and his rear feet upstairs, that he would
stand no other way, and in course of time his front legs would have to
lengthen enough to let his head reach his manger, or his neck would have
to stretch. Either would give him the general appearance of a giraffe.
While this would be neat for show purposes, it would attract almost too
much attention in a family horse. I have no doubt this is the way the
giraffe acquired its peculiar construction, but we were able to avoid
it, for we awoke one night when Bob made an unaided descent into the
manure pit, and when we went to aid him we found he had descended at
both ends, on account of the economical hinges used on the drop floor
of the stall of our equine palace. Bob showed in every way that he had
enjoyed that drop more than any drop he had ever taken, but I drew the
line there. I had other things to do more important than conducting a
private Coney Island for a horse. If Bob had been a colt I might not
have been so stern about it, but I will not pamper a staid old family
horse by operating shoot-the-chutes and loop-the-loops for him at two
o'clock in the morning.
“Isobel,” I said, “if that horse is to continue in my stable you may
tell Mr. Prawley that it is necessary for his health that he sleep in
the stable-loft hereafter. It will be good exercise for him to get up at
midnight and pull Bob out of the manure pit.”
“This present Mr. Prawley will not do it,” said Isobel. “He has a wife
and family at East Westcote, and he--”
“Very well,” I said, “then get another Mr. Prawley!”
Of the new Mr. Prawley it is necessary to speak a few words.