CHAPTER XI
TANDEM HARNESS.
|Best kind of harness simple and light.| The harness should be as simple and as light as possible, consistent with strength. The colour is a matter of taste and convenience, but perhaps for country work brown with brass mounts is the most suitable, whereas for driving in the Park black harness is almost de rigueur. Certainly for soldiers at home, and more especially abroad, brown is far the most useful, because it is a part of every mounted soldier’s training to clean this kind of leather.
|Wheel harness.| The wheeler’s harness is an ordinary single set with one or two trifling additions, none of which are absolutely necessary. These are two brass rings or loops fixed under the trace buckles, into which are fastened the spring hooks of the leader’s traces, and terrets on the pad divided by a roller to separate the reins. For the former short pieces of leather can be substituted, which have holes punched in one end, through which the tongues of the trace buckles pass, while at the other end are sewn metal rings to take the hooks of the leader’s traces. |Lead harness.| The leader should have a pad of rather lighter make than the wheeler, with two fixed leather loops, one at each side, for the traces to run through. There must also be a bearing-strap passing over the horse’s loins, and this should be just long enough to keep the traces level.
|Lead traces.| The traces are usually made long enough to be fixed to the loops on the wheeler’s traces, as already described. This is the simplest and most economical plan, but another method consists in having two swingle bars, by means of which the leader’s traces can be reduced to the same length as those of the wheeler.
|Swingle bars.| The first of these bars, which is about two feet six inches in length, has a large hook about five inches long fixed in its front, and a light chain about one foot long attached at the back. The chain is hooked to a ring in the bottom of the wheeler’s hames, and is intended to prevent the bar from falling down. At each end of the bar are two short traces about two feet long, which hook into the wheeler’s trace in the same way as previously described for the long ones.
|Advantages of swingle bars over long traces.| The second bar is a light swingle-tree about two feet in length, having an eyelet to attach it to the hook of the other bar.
Advocates for this system claim that it is less dangerous than the other, because neither horse can get a leg over the trace, nor can a trace wrap round the leader’s quarter if he swings suddenly round to study the view in rear. The second method however entails more expense and trouble than the first, which with careful driving need rarely be the cause of accidents.
|Traces hooked to shafts dangerous.| The leader’s traces are sometimes hooked to the points of the shafts, but as this is a most dangerous system it should never be employed.
I have seen tandem traces extemporized out of ordinary single-harness traces and pole chains, the latter bridging the gap between the wheeler’s traces and the leader’s. This arrangement looked very smart, but must make the lead traces too heavy.
|Breast harness.| Although not so smart as a collar, breast harness can be used in tandem equally as well as in single harness, and as it can be adjusted to fit any horse its use avoids the necessity of spending money on numerous collars. It also comes in very useful when a horse’s shoulders have been wrung by a collar (see Chap. I.).