|TOM FAGAN, of this city, has a wild horse that don't seem to take
to the rush and hurry and turmoil of a metropolis. He has been so
accustomed to the glad, free air of the plains and mountains that the
hampered and false life of a throbbing city, with its myriad industries,
makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and
the pure breath of the lifegiving mountain atmosphere. So taciturn is
he in fact, and so cursed by homesickness and weariness of an artificial
and unnatural horse society here in Laramie, that he refuses to eat
anything and is gradually pining away. Sometimes he takes a light lunch
out of Mr. Fagan's arm, but for days and days he utterly loathes food.
He also loathes those who try to go into the stable and fondle him.
He isn't apparently very much on the fondle. He don't yearn for human
society, but seems to want to be by himself and think it over.
The wild horse in stories soon learns to love his master and stay by him
and carry him through flood or fire, and generally knows more than the
Cyclopedia Brittanica; but this horse is not the historical horse that
they put into wild Arabian falsehoods. He is just a plain, unassuming
wild horse of Wyoming descent, whose pedigree is slightly clouded, and
who is sensitive on the question of his ancestry. All he wants is just
to be let alone, and most everybody has decided that he is right. They
came do that conclusion after they had soaked their persons in arnica
and glued themselves together with poultices.
[Illustration: 0089]
Perhaps, after a while, he will conclude to eat hay and grow up with
the country, but now he sighs for his native bunch-grass and the buffalo
wallow wherein he has heretofore made his lair. We don't wonder much,
though, that a horse who has lived in the country should be a little
rattled here when he finds the electric light, and bicycles, and lawn
mowers, and Uncle Tom's Cabin troupes, and baled hay at $20 per ton. It
makes him as wild and skittish as it does an eighteen-year-old girl the
first time she comes into town, and for the first time is met by the
blare of trumpets, and the oriental wealth of the circus with its
deformed camels and uniformed tramps driving its miles of cages with
no animals in them. The great natural world and the giddy maelstrom
of seething, perspiring humanity, peculiar to the city world, are two
separate and distinct existences.