Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
IV—THE TRAINING OF THE QUEEN OF “SHEBY”
I WAS awake so long in the night I overslept next morning, of course. Breakfast had been cleared away by the time I got dressed and was down-stairs.
I had made up my mind to have a run-in with my uncle, but I was starting with a disadvantage. Coming late to breakfast in that busy household amounted almost to a crime, and the look of disgust my aunt Lucretia set on my face made my courage drop tail. She was never amiable, and she considered me an intruder in the family, as well I knew.
“I have left your doughnuts and coffee in the but’ry—and your uncle wants you in the stable.” She turned her back and went on with what she was doing at the stove.
I ate the doughnuts on my way to the stable, trying to whip up my rancor. I expected to be received with a hoot and a howl, and depended on those spurs to start my own temper on the gallop.
Uncle Deck was just pushing a bottle back into the oats in the bin. He slammed down the cover and wiped his mouth and grinned at me. He was in the best of good humor. I was chewing on food his money had bought, and, I repeat, he was as pleasant as a basket of chips. In the face of that I couldn’t screw a mean word out of myself.
“She sure was some operator with her claws,” he remarked. But he wouldn’t listen to my indignant explanation; he plainly had his own business on his mind that morning, and it was business which seemed to be affording much satisfaction. He gave me a push toward the harness-room, the sanctum where he performed most of his deviltry in horse matters.
In that harness-room was hitched the worst-looking old pelter of a plug I had ever laid eyes on.
Uncle Deck put his hands on his hips and swapped looks between myself and the horse. He was master of a certain kind of cheap, horse-jockey patter which he employed at fairs when he wanted to call a crowd around. He struck a pose and “orated.”
“Having a knowledge of hoss pedigree, relatives, previous condition of servitude, religious preferences, and other matters pertaining to, and so forth, even going back to the fact that the hoss Bucephalorus, that was owned by the late Aleck the Great, cocked his left hind leg when he stood in the stall, had a nicked right ear, and a wind-gall puff behind each fore shoulder, I want to say that I reckon that never before was there gathered, collected, and assembled on four legs every kind of a pimple, bump, wheeze, scratch, spavin, horn ail, hock bunch, trick, and bobblewhoop, that’s laid down by old Medicombobulus, in his book entitled ‘Things a Hoss Can Get Along Without.’ I call this ancient Gothic ruin ‘Carpenter Boy,’ sired by Pod Auger, dammed by Hemlock Maid—and, in fact, damned by everybody who has ever owned him. Speed is developed in him by feeding the celebrated spiral oats, produced by crossing shoe-pegs with bed-springs, which in process of being digested uncoil and carry the animile in leaps like the mountain-goat.”
After that outburst I definitely, in my own mind, set forward to some future date the matter of an understanding with my uncle.
“How did it ever happen that anybody could unload this on you?” I asked him.
“Because I went out hunting for it, sonny. It was the worst I could do on short notice. If it had looked worse and had had more ailments and outs I would have paid more for it. Now ask no more questions, but lend a hand to what I tell you to do.”
I have no time to go into the details of what my uncle Deck did to that equine framework, but if I could describe it all I’d be furnishing considerable of a handbook for the uses of tricky horse-swappers. I had helped in many similar jobs in that back room of his stable, but I had never seen him put so much art and soul into the work before; he seemed to have special reasons for his painstaking toil. He chuckled whenever he secured a particularly good result; at times he gritted his teeth and swore under his breath regarding some party whom he did not name. But I gathered that this transformation of a horse was intended as satisfaction of one of his bitterest grudges.
He had everything to do with in that horse beauty-parlor of his. There were ointments and colorings, false hair for mane and tail, skin-patches and disguises for puffs and swellings. But still the horse remained gaunt; the rafters of his ribs suggested that he needed to be shingled in. To my general wonderment as to what my uncle was about, anyway, was now added more lively curiosity; how was this living skeleton to be disguised as to skinniness? I found out before long. My uncle put on the poor brute a bridle with a wicked twist-bit and told me to hold him, no matter how much he kicked about.
Then Uncle Deck brought out a bit of board into which shoe-pegs had been set thickly. He began to clap the pegged board against the horse’s skin. I had my work cut out for me after that, I can tell you. The pain must have been excruciating, for the bradding-pegs raised blisters. In a little while the ribs were hidden by this new and deceptive plumpness. The horse took on the appearance of an animal which had been well cared for in the food line. And he certainly displayed the spirit of Phoebus’s nigh wheel-horse. His nostrils snorted furiously and his eyes flamed. It seemed incredible that this animal with flowing mane and tail, with round barrel and smooth limbs, was the decrepit old creature I had seen on my arrival in the room.
Lastly, my uncle Deck oiled the horse from stem to stem, smoothing the hair into place, and then stood and admired his handiwork.
“Now let’s see what the needle will do for style and knee action,” he said. He gave the horse a jab with the hypodermic—I had seen him do that at horse-trots just before the race was started. He hitched a long rope into the bridle and led the animal out into the yard. In a few moments the horse was prancing and curveting and whickering like a blueblood of youth and spirit.
“But he won’t last this way!” I said.
My uncle turned withering side-glance on me. “Do you think you’re telling me something I didn’t know? Of course he won’t last. I don’t want him to last. If he would pop like a blown-up paper bag when I got ready to have it happen I’d like it all the better. But, as it is, it’ll be bad enough. Don’t you know a good name for him out of some of those books you have read, son?”
But while I was hesitating my uncle dipped in with his usual impatience.
“I have thought of it already! ‘Judge,’ that’s his name. When she hears Trufant call him ‘Judge’ the coincidence will catch her interest, likely enough. She will prick up her ears!”
Right then I pricked up my own ears. I understood mighty sudden. I had seen the writing tacked on the notice-board in the post-office the day before. Judge Kingsley had let it be known that he was in the market for a driving-horse, suitable for use by ladies. I had read it with mingled emotions, realizing that Celene Kingsley had grown to girlhood out of childhood; no longer a pony-cart for her!
“But he’ll never buy a horse from you?” I blurted, staring at my uncle.
“Who won’t?”
“Judge Kingsley.”
“Probably he wouldn’t if he thought it came from me. But I’m baiting a hook that he’ll swallow or I’m no guesser.”
My eyes were full of questions and he saw fit to humor me.
“Seeing it’s all in the family, son, I’ll tell you. I’ve got to let out a few holes in my surcingle or I’ll bust. ‘Squealing John’ Runnels, of Carmel, will drive this hoss into Judge Kingsley’s dooryard to-night, around dusk, representing that he is a poor woman who needs money in a hurry so that she can get her husband out of trouble. ‘Squealing John’ has got a woman’s voice, and he will wear some of his wife’s clothes.”
“I don’t see how you can get a man to do that,” I objected.
My uncle raised his hand above his head and slowly clinched his fingers.