Buying a Horse | Page 6

ran into the house to repair the omission, and left Billy, as
usual, unhitched at the door. During his absence, Billy caught sight of
his stable, and involuntarily moved towards it. Finding himself
unchecked, he gently increased his pace; and when my friend, looking
up from the melon-patch which he was admiring, called out, "Ho, Billy!
Whoa, Billy!" and headed him off from the gap, Billy profited by the
circumstance to turn into the pear orchard. The elastic turf under his
unguided hoof seemed to exhilarate him; his pace became a trot, a
canter, a gallop, a tornado; the reins fluttered like ribbons in the air; the
phaeton flew ruining after. In a terrible cyclone the equipage swept
round the neighbor's house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down his
lawn, and vanished again. It was incredible.
My friend stood transfixed among his melons. He knew that his
neighbor's children played under the porte-cochère on the other side of
the house which Billy had just surrounded in his flight, and probably....
My friend's first impulse was not to go and see, but to walk into his
own house, and ignore the whole affair. But you cannot really ignore an

affair of that kind. You must face it, and commonly it stares you out of
countenance. Commonly, too, it knows how to choose its time so as to
disgrace as well as crush its victim. His neighbor had people to tea, and
long before my friend reached the house the host and his guests were
all out on the lawn, having taken the precaution to bring their napkins
with them.
"The children!" gasped my friend.
"Oh, they were all in bed," said the neighbor, and he began to laugh.
That was right; my friend would have mocked at the calamity if it had
been his neighbor's. "Let us go and look up your phaeton." He put his
hand on the naked flank of a fine young elm, from which the bark had
just been stripped. "Billy seems to have passed this way."
At the foot of a stone-wall four feet high lay the phaeton, with three
wheels in the air, and the fourth crushed flat against the axle; the
willow back was broken, the shafts were pulled out, and Billy was
gone.
"Good thing there was nobody in it," said the neighbor.
"Good thing it didn't run down some Irish family, and get you in for
damages," said a guest.
It appeared, then, that there were two good things about this disaster.
My friend had not thought there were so many, but while he rejoiced in
this fact, he rebelled at the notion that a sorrow like that rendered the
sufferer in any event liable for damages, and he resolved that he never
would have paid them. But probably he would.
Some half-grown boys got the phaeton right-side up, and restored its
shafts and cushions, and it limped away with them towards the
carriage-house. Presently another half-grown boy came riding Billy up
the hill. Billy showed an inflated nostril and an excited eye, but
physically he was unharmed, save for a slight scratch on what was
described as the off hind-leg; the reader may choose which leg this was.

"The worst of it is," said the guest, "that you never can trust 'em after
they've run off once."
"Have some tea?" said the host to my friend.
"No, thank you," said my friend, in whose heart the worst of it rankled;
and he walked home embittered by his guilty consciousness that Billy
ought never to have been left untied. But it was not this self-reproach; it
was not the mutilated phaeton; it was not the loss of Billy, who must
now be sold; it was the wreck of settled hopes, the renewed suspense of
faith, the repetition of the tragical farce of buying another horse, that
most grieved my friend.
Billy's former owners made a feint of supplying other horses in his
place, but the only horse supplied was an aged veteran with the
scratches, who must have come seven early in our era, and who, from
his habit of getting about on tiptoe, must have been tender for'a'd
beyond anything of my friend's previous experience. Probably if he
could have waited they might have replaced Billy in time, but their next
installment from the West produced nothing suited to his wants but a
horse with the presence and carriage of a pig, and he preferred to let
them sell Billy for what he would bring, and to trust his fate elsewhere.
Billy had fallen nearly one half in value, and he brought very little--to
his owner; though the new purchaser was afterwards reported to value
him at much more than what my friend had paid for him. These things
are really mysteries; you cannot fathom