Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  Horses and oxen were hitched to the limbs of trees or grazed near at hand, quite without interest in whatever was taking place. Sledges and wagons rested their shafts on the ground, seeming to wait patiently.

  “Is it a pulling bee?” asked Evans, leaning against True’s side.

  “Yaas, but I guess it’s about over, now,” drawled a lank youth, coming out of the mill with a sack of meal on his shoulder.

  “Anybody but you in a hurry to be going homealong?” questioned Nye, crushingly.

  The youth did not answer, but went on to his sledge.

  “There’s a jug of Medford rum in the store for the owner of the horse that can get that there log on my runway this evening,” explained Miller Chase to Evans.

  “Now I want to know!” exclaimed Evans, carelessly, “Why didn’t you say so before? You seem to be making quite a chore of a very simple thing; I’ll just have my little horse do it for you in a jiffy!”

  A shout of derisive laughter greeted his remark.

  “Now do tell!” cried Hiram Sage, sarcastically.

  “That pony pull a log my Jim refused?” scoffed another.

  “My ‘pony,’ as you call him,” laughed Evans, good-naturedly, “has never refused me yet.” He placed his arm over True’s neck; the horse rattled his chains musically, and reached for a low-handing bough.

  “Work is play for this animal,” Evans went on. “We’ve been in the logging field all day, but that don’t make a mite o’ difference to the Morgan horse. Come, show us your log!” True shook himself again and went on chewing leaves.

  “Why, that beast’s naught but a colt!” said Jim’s owner, scornfully.

  “Colt or no, he’s the finest bit o’ horseflesh this side of The Plains of Abraham!” Evans contended, hotly. “Give him his head and he goes like a shot and doesn’t pull an ounce, and as for drawing a load—when this horse starts, something’s got to come! That is,” he added with a laugh, “as long as the tugs last!”

  “Well, stop your bragging,” said the sarcastic Hiram; “actions speak louder than words. Hitch him up that there ‘something’ and let us see it ‘come.’” Miller Chase stepped forward, hospitably.

  “First come in, men, and fix up your bets over a mug,” he said.

  They went inside the shop, all talking at once, and left True nibbling among the grasses and weeds. When they had disappeared he glanced at the log which the other horses had refused—horses much larger and heavier than he. The opportunity he had hoped for had come!

  “But can I do it?” he asked himself.

  The answer was, he could, and would. He was spurred to the greatest effort of his life by the taunt that he was a “pony.” At any rate he was over fourteen hands and weighed nine hundred and fifty pounds!

  “As I understand it,” Evans was saying, as the men came out of the shop, “the agreement is that my horse has got to pull that big log ten rods onto the logway, in three pulls, or I lose?”

  “That’s the idea, exactly,” assented Miller Chase.

  Evans took hold of True’s bridle confidently, and led him to the enormous log, where he fastened the tugs properly. Then he stepped one side and looked the young horse straight in the eye.

  True returned his look—they might almost have been said to have exchanged a wink.

  At this thought, Evans shouted with laughter.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, when he could speak seriously, “I am ashamed to ask my horse to pull a little weight like that on a test—couldn’t two or three of you get on and ride?”

  Then Evans was sure he saw a twinkle in True’s eye.

  A loud laugh greeted the proposal. “But, man, that there’s a dead lift!” expostulated the miller.

  “Well, mine’s a live horse,” Evans cried, with a grin. “Get on there! Justin Morgan’s waitin’ for to take you to drive!”

  From this day the young horse was called Justin Morgan’s. It was an easy transition to drop the possessive “s,” after a while, and call him “Justin Morgan.” With much hilarity three men climbed up on the log.

  By this time darkness had fallen and Master Chase ran to get his lanthorn, swinging it back and forth, as he returned.

  “Mind you don’t fall off,” Evans warned the men. “‘Something’ is about to ‘come.’”

  And “something” did!

  Justin Morgan’s horse gathered himself together, almost crouching, and waited for the word to start. When it was given, his chest muscles strained, his wide nostrils were scarlet and dilated, and this scion of Arabia’s proud breed moved off as if inspired by Allah himself for an almost miraculous feat.

  The bystanders, craning their necks to see, ran alongside; the men, perched on the log, fell off as it rocked from side to side, and then the young horse paused for breath—or to recover his strength.

  Utter silence was over all. There was no jeering now. The second pull landed the log on the logway, and the amazed men broke into the wildest cheers ever heard at Chase’s Mill.

  Burnham continues the fictionalized story of the first Morgan horse. Justin Morgan the man becomes increasingly ill and is forced to sell Justin Morgan the horse. With his new owners he finds kind treatment, satisfying work, cheerful conversations with interesting horses, and, improbably, a role as an equine Paul Revere in the War of 1812. Except for a brief period late in life he lives out his years in comfort and honor. Burnham makes little mention of what really made Justin Morgan famous—the hundreds of offspring that created the Morgan breed.

  24

  White Horse Winter

  by Wilbur Daniel Steele

  Wilbur Daniel Steele was among the most popular short story writers in the United States at a time when almost every literate person at least occasionally read short stories. Although he was born in North Carolina, Steele lived for many years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he discovered some of his favorite themes and settings. He found special inspiration in the lives of the Portuguese fishermen of Cape Cod.

  “White Horse Winter,” one of Steele’s best stories, does center on Portuguese Americans, but at its heart is the magnificent horse of the title. At first, neither the characters nor the readers are quite sure whether the white horse is a dream or a ghost or an illusion. Or could he be real?

  The little house where I was born, and in which I passed the earlier years of my life, stands about a hundred yards back from the beach and a little more than a mile down shore from Old Harbor. What we always knew as the “Creek” runs in there, with plenty of water even at low tide to float my father’s dory; and the flawless yellow face of a dune used to stand up behind the house, sheltering us from the northerlies that pick the scud from the ocean, a mile back across the Neck, and spatter it in the bay at our front door. My father and mother still live in the house, but the dune has shifted to the westward, and it is colder there on a winter night.

  My older sister was born before my father and mother came from the Western Islands, so she had a recollection of green country; but we younger children knew nothing but the water and the sand. Strangely enough, my most vivid remembrance of the water is not from any of its wilder moods: I picture it with the tide out at evening, reflecting the face of the western sky, flat, garish-colored, silent, with a spur of mute fire reaching out at me along the surface of the Creek.

  The dunes were the magic land, full of shifting shadows, and deceptive, where a little covey of beach plums made themselves out as a far-away and impenetrable forest, especially when the mist came inland, and a footprint in the sand across a hollow appeared a vast convulsion of nature at the other end of a day’s journey. And one felt the dunes always moving, rising up out of the sea, marching silently across the Neck, and advancing upon the little house. I can remember the spring when the sand ate up a pear-tree my father had brought from the Islands.

  The dunes entered our lives, and b
ecame a part of them. Even now the sight of a strip of sand gets a queer grip on me, and to this day I am apt to catch myself spying out the skyline with an indefinable and portentous dread. I cannot shake off this sensation, although I know perfectly what it is. It is a relic from that time which we have always called, in our family, White Horse Winter.

  I remember my father’s coming in one October day and standing a long time before the barometer which always hung behind the kitchen door. After a while he said to my mother in his broken English,—

  “It weel be ver’ bad weather tonight—tomorrow.”

  That night when I was trying to get to sleep, I heard the skirmishers of a great wind feeling at the shingles above my head.

  My next recollection is of the tumult of a gale outside, mingled with beating on the door downstairs, and distracted fragments of men’s voices calling to one another of a vessel come ashore. I knew it must be at Round Hill or they would not have come past our house.

  Then I was out myself, where no boy of ten had any business to be, isolated in the center of a vast disruption, except when an occasional agitated phantom passed in the rocking darkness toward Round Hill Bars. I had an acute consciousness of doing wrong, and with all the fight to keep my feet in the chaos of sand and wind and scud, the thought of what my father would do if he came upon me lay heavy on my mind.

  After a time one of the shore dunes came up before me, black, with an aura of distracted sand about its crest and the sky behind it gray with the labor of dawn. The silhouettes of men, and of a few women, were running about over it and pointing to sea with jerking arms. But I was afraid to go up there—still with the fear of my father’s anger—so I ran to the northward in the hollow a hundred yards or so before I felt it safe to venture upon the ridge, where I cowered down, a very small and very tired-out boy.

  It was a full-rigged ship. Her main and mizzen were already gone, and her foremast writhed in dismal and contorted circles toward the sky, a frail, sensitive needle point marking every onslaught and repulse of the fight below, where the vessel wallowed in the smother between the outer and inner bars. Inshore, on the torn and clamorous beach, the figures of the lifesaving crew moved about their boat with futile gestures, lifting cursed hands to their faces to scream soundless words at one another. The wind was like a blast from the colossal explosion that flared behind the eastern clouds.

  But it was the water that fascinated me that morning. The Round Hill Bars make a talking, even in a moderate breeze, which can be heard in our kitchen across the Neck. Now their shouting seemed to me to fill up the whole bowl of the visible world, rumbling around its misty confines in tangled reverberations. I could see the outer bar only as a white, distorted line athwart the gray, but the shoreward shallows were writhing, living things, gnawing at the sky with venomous teeth of spume, and giving birth in agony to the legions which advanced forever and forever upon the land.

  My mother used sometimes to sing a little Portuguese song to my brother Antone, the baby. It had a part which ran:

  The herd of the Sea King’s White Horses

  Comes up on the shore to graze . . .

  It pleased my boy mind, on this morning, to figure them as ravening, stung to frenzy by the lash of the gale, tossing maddened manes, and bellowing, for horses were not common in that fisher country. Try as I might, my eyes would not stay on the wreck, but returned inevitably to those squadrons of white horses advancing out of the mist. They were very fearsome things to me at that time, although I was old enough to know that they were not alive and could not possibly get at me.

  Then a tremendous wave broke and flattened out in a smother on the beach, and I was sure for a moment I had seen an actual horse struggling there. The next breaker overwhelmed the place, swirling, thunderous, shot its thin mottled tongue far up the sand and withdrew it seething into the undertow—and now there could be no doubt that a horse was there, screaming, pawing at the treacherous sand, his wide glistening back horribly convulsed, and eyes and nostrils of flame.

  Many and many a time since then I have had it all in a dream; and in the dream, even now, I am swept back into something of the elemental terror that held the boy cowering on the ridge of sand while the great white stallion staggered up the face of the dune and stood against the sky, coughing and coughing and coughing.

  Of a sudden, I knew that I must run away from that thing, and I scrambled out of my little burrow and ran, not daring to look back, not daring to ease my pace when the sand dragged too cruelly at my shoes—ran and ran—till I found myself in the safe haven of the front room at the little house, and my mother stirring a pan over the kitchen stove.

  I staggered out to her, crying that a horse had come out of the water and run after me. She thought that I was feverish, had had a bad dream, and it occurred to me that I need not let her know I had been where I should not have been that morning. She packed me off to bed again, and when I woke in the afternoon I was of even minds myself whether I had dreamed it all or not. Certainly it was cut from the cloth of a dream.

  During the weeks that followed I heard a deal about the wreck, from my father and from others who came past on the state road, and stopped to chat. It was a bad affair, that wreck. The shore people could see her men, now and then when the rack drifted aside for a moment, swarming over the deck like ants disturbed by a pail of water. One of these glimpses showed them the crew clustered about the boats on the lee side, and then the lifesavers burned in vain the signal which means, “Do not attempt to leave in your own boats”; the next lifting of the curtain discovered the ship’s decks bare of life, and seventeen bodies were dragged from the surf that day.

  But a strange thing happened when the lifesavers rowed out to the hulk after the sea had gone down. In the cabin they came upon a young man, dry-clothed, sitting before a fire in the stove, plainly much shaken by the experiences of the night, but still with a grip on himself. He asked if the boats had come ashore all right, and when Captain Hall told him, he seemed taken aback.

  “Nothing come ashore?” he asked.

  “Nothing alive,” said the captain. The other looked into the fire a while, white, and shaking a little. “I was afeared to go with the sailors,” he said, after a time.

  Of course the story did not come to me in this straight sequence, but merely as haphazard snatches from the gossip of my elders, some of it not clearly till years afterwards—for the details of a great wreck are treasured among people of the sea so long as the generation lasts.

  It was almost a week before I went out on the dunes again. Although I was now convinced that I had seen something that was not, still even a bad dream is not a thing for a child to shake off lightly. But my sister Agnes’s eighteenth birthday was coming soon now, and it was always a custom in our family to signalize such events with a cake and bayberry candles. So I was off this day to the north of Snail Road, where the bottom of a certain hollow is covered with a mat of bayberry bushes. It takes a good many bayberries to make even a small candle, and the dark was beginning to come down when the basket was filled and I started back across the sand hills toward home.

  The dunes were very silent and very misty and very lonely that evening; I trudged along with my small head going about like the mythical owl’s, but the dusk remained empty of any horror till I had come across Snail Road and into the region of black sand where one may scoop out a little hole and drink fresh water. I almost always did this, whether I was thirsty or not, but that night I was saved the trouble of scooping the hole—or would have been had I cared to take advantage of the great glistening gash that lay in my path. It was no work of human hands. All about the place the sand was churned and scarred by enormous, deep tracks, and a double thread of them led away over the eastern skyline. Then I was running again, as I had that other morning, running all the way to the little house, careless of the bayberries that strewed my backward trail.

  Two nights after, we were
all sitting around the fire in our kitchen. There was no wind that evening and the tide was down beyond the flats, so that all was very quiet outside the little house, and a note of distant trumpeting came plain to us through the crisp night. It was surely a queer sound for our country, but its significance passed me till my father spoke to my mother.

  “It’s the white horse again,” he said. My mother nodded, without curiosity or surprise.

  “Yes,” she answered, “we must keep Zhoe”—that was I, Joe—“off the dunes more.”

  But they could not keep me off the dunes entirely, now that the white horse had become actual and an object of common gossip. I took an adventurous pleasure in climbing to the top of the hill behind the house and overlooking the country of hummocks. Especially was this fine to do of an early evening, when the light had left the sand and the ridges stood out black against the sky.

  I saw him many times from this point of security—always as a dark, far-away silhouette, tremendous, laboring over the back of a dune or standing with his great head flung up and tail streaming on the wind. His presence there gave the whole dune land a new aspect for me—as of a familiar country grown sinister and full of the shadow of disaster. Nights when the wind was northerly, his racketing sometimes came to me in the loft where my cot stood; then I would shiver under the clothes and fall asleep to dream of being lost in a wilderness of shifting dunes, and that great shaggy white beast above me on a ridge, coughing and coughing and coughing. Once he must have come plunging down the face of our own hill, because we were startled by a splashing of sand on the shingles of an outhouse, followed by a great snorting and a ripping of fence timbers. That night even my father and mother were pale.

  For I was not the only one who was afraid. Some of the men came out from Old Harbor with lines one day to take the animal, and at first sight of him, suddenly, over the angle of a dune, dropped their entanglements and fled back past our house, running heavily. And that was in the flat sun light of midday. After that men went over to Round Hill Station by other and circuitous routes.