Part 10

The boy, the pony and I went back to the stableman to-day, and the latter offered me thirty dollars for the pony, saddle and bridle. I told him I thought thirty dollars rather an extravagant expenditure for a week’s use of a pony, but the man seemed to have forgotten that he had sold him to me. When I reminded him of the fact, he said he couldn’t buy and sell horses without making something; that the buying and selling of horses was his business; that he had a family to support and expenses to meet; but seeing as how I was, anxious to sell, though he had no particular use for a pony, and as long as it was me, he’d give me thirty-two fifty for the outfit. I had finally learned the value of the pony, and being loth to impose upon him something that he did not need, I concluded not to sell, notwithstanding the side-saddle and the ability of the pony to consume himself monthly. The boy approved the plan—that is all this emergency demands. I shall yet “fish off’n that pony.”

The dining-room of the caravansary where my boy takes me to get our daily bread is presided over by a goddess possessed of a pink cotton gown and a Grecian nose with a mole—an exquisite sorrel mole with two sable hairs pendant. Looked at from any point of the compass she resembles a shingle with an old-fashioned candle extinguisher for a head. The former physical peculiarity is the result, I presume, of the Mother Hubbard cut of the cotton robe; the latter, of the manner in which she dresses her hair. While she served the fried liver to-day, a pensive sadness lingering about her blue eyes exaggerated the mole, and it seemed that both the mole and its owner felt they were out of place. As she stood over against me, with the stoneware platter of felicity gracefully poised in her nut-brown hands, hers was that “far-away look” we read about, and I thought,

“The melancholy days have come, The saddest of the year.”

Might she not be a New England school ma’am away for a vacation? Or perhaps one of our own seminary young ladies escaped for a holiday. I had heard of such vagaries in other hill countries further east, and knew that fashion followed the star of empire rapidly. I had never met any poets—might she not be one? Her style of coiffure and number seven boot were suggestive of something out of the ordinary, to say the least. Presuming upon the far-away look and my paternal appearance, I said:

“My dear, can I have a glass of milk?”

The look was not so far away any more—only about three feet, or less; and to me the little boy appeared quite as tall as I, as she answered:

“No, sir; we buy our milk.”

I wanted to ask her if I might infer that all else in that hostelry was stolen, but daren’t. She left me in this collapsed condition, and the boy then wanted to know of me who she was. I ventured to tell him she was the lost pleiad. Then he wanted to know what a pleiad was. When I had explained as well as my limited knowledge of mythology would permit, he wanted to know if the pleiades were in the Milky Way. In my then condition of mind, the inquiry from any other source would have proved the proverbial “last straw.” He pouted on my laughing at him, and threatened to tell the young woman that I had said her husband was in hell rolling stones. Only the promised deprivation of the pony, in such event, averted the calamity.

Sometime during that forenoon my boy picked up a friend whom he brought into camp behind him on the pony. This other boy was dressed in the remains of a shirt, with some other man’s pants, strapped to his arm pits by a relic of suspender and rolled up to his knees. The iris of one eye was black, the other gray; his hair had the withered appearance of having been cured in the sun; his skin russet and of grain leather texture. He might have been half a score or three in years; if he had ever possessed any timidity the sharp edges of it had been rubbed off years ago. Looking down at me with a Selkirkian satisfaction, he inquired hoarsely:

“I say, Mister, be you this kid’s dad?”

“His mother says so, and I have no reason to doubt it.”

“Is she the boss?”

“She is.”

“Thought so; does she chaw gum?”

“No.”

“What! Don’t chaw gum! What kind of a Christian is she, anyway?”

“A Methodist—an orthodox.”

“Well, so’s mam, and she chaws gum, you bet—see that”—and he held out a hand that in its normal state would have rivaled Vulcan’s for color; but the combination of pitch and dirt exhibited was a marvel of blackness. “That’s her’n.”

Thinking my turn had come, and taking advantage of the momentary lull, I inquired his name.

“Tom.”

“What is your surname?”

“My what?”

“Your other name?”

“Oh! Hain’t got none.”

“What is your mother’s name?”

“Mam, you mean?—Jane.”

“Well, what is her other name?”

“Dunno.”