She took the empty pail and went out with it, coming back a few minutes later with the pail refilled and setting it once more into the manger. She talked to her a few minutes, then went away. Queen saw her sit down beside the cow and soon heard the peculiar sound of milk streams beating against the walls of a tin pail. She watched her and listened for a while but since the cow who was most concerned in the matter seemed not the least worried, she turned to her water.
When the woman was through milking, she drove out the cow and fed the calf and then sending it out too, she came back to Queen. She stood leaning forward against the manger and talked to her for a long time. There was something about that voice that made Queen think of ducks paddling on the surface of a pond at night, or the songs with which they sang themselves to sleep. It was a sound as of birds on branches of trees overhead pushing into each other and expressing the desire for warmth or the comfort of having it. The words followed each other slowly and softly and there was neither threat nor authority in them. Queen studied the strange face with the light playing upon it. She was still slightly uncertain about the eyes that she was afraid of and that strangely fascinated her. She was afraid to look into them, yet there was something in them that was in a way overcoming her. Was it the wetness about those eyes that in some way, perhaps never to be known, affected Queen? Was it the sympathy that the suffering have for the suffering that Queen recognised and that made her blindly place her hope in this new and mysteriously different human being?
When the woman went out Queen felt as she had felt on many a winter night in the wilds when some warm body next to her suddenly got up and left one side of her disagreeably cold. For the rest of the afternoon she kept turning her head toward the doorway and pricking her ears with more hope than expectation, and throughout the long disappointing hours the voice of the woman poured through her mind like a stream, like a long persistent melody, and its even flow was rhythmically measured by the one word that she remembered most clearly. “Dora!” What it meant she did not know, but she felt in a vague way, when she heard it, that it applied to her.
Next morning her owner put the saddle on her again, and though she was very nervous and afraid and would have fled at the first real opportunity, the lesson went by without much of the pain and agony of the first lesson. She began to understand what every pull of the reins meant and even the differences she heard in the man’s voice helped her to avoid trouble, as for instance, when by the sound of his voice she knew that he was impatient with her going too slowly and she sprang forward into a more rapid gait before the man felt it necessary to apply the spurs.
In the afternoon the woman came into the barn to give her water and to talk to her. When she patted her forehead, Queen did not resist and in time began to crave the touch of that hand, as she craved the sound of that voice.
Day after day she had her little run over the fields and as her fear of the farmer lessened slightly, she began to enjoy the exercise. It broke the crushing monotony of standing in the barn and gave her a chance to look at the plains she loved. So too it gave her a chance to see the other horses, none of whom were kept in the barn any longer. She found that the group in the corral had been very greatly reduced and the mysterious reduction worried her. The brown stallion was gone and with him all the horses she had known, except the little bay mare, who did not seem to be on friendly terms with the other two horses in the corral. She was always off by herself and at the call of Queen would come rushing to the wire fence and beg her to join her.
One day the boy jumped upon her back. The man stood by and watched. The boy annoyed her by the way he sat and by the way he held the reins and she could hear the man angrily instructing him. She could feel him changing his ways and realised that the man was taking her part, somehow; but when they got away off on the fields, he tormented her. He kept digging his spurs into her sides even while she was running her best and he pulled steadily on the reins, hurting her palate and her lips and making it difficult for her to see the stone or holes in her path. But much as she hated and feared this boy, he was as yet afraid to mistreat her. What he really was capable of doing to torment her, she was yet to learn.
The old touch of melancholy just barely perceptible on Queen’s beautiful head deepened rapidly as submission took possession of her soul. She learned her lessons hastily and learned them well for fear of the pain that inevitably followed mistakes; yet somewhere in the very heart of that submission crouched an indestructible hope that sometime, somehow, she would break the chains of her bondage and go galloping back to her wilds.