And as he so stood, a flea-bitten, speckled white in color, he looked like a section out of the main snowy range of the Rocky Mountains: the two wide-set ears representing the Spanish Peaks; his sloping neck their northern declivity; his high withers, sharply outlined vertebrae, and towering quarters the serrated range crest; his banged tail a glacier reaching down toward its moraine!
Sol needed exercise, and that afternoon I was permitted the privilege of riding him. Mounted from a chair and settled in the saddle, I felt as if I must surely be bestriding St. Patrick's Cathedral. But at a shake of the reins the parallel ceased. His pasterns were supple as an Arab four-year-old's, his muscles steel springs.
Myself quite as gray as Sol and, relatively, of about the same age, as lives of men and horses go, we early fell into a mutual sympathy that soon ripened into a fast friendship. At Christmas I returned to the Club to spend holiday week, in fact sought the invitation to be with Sol. Every day we went out together, Sol and I, morning and afternoon. Bright, warm, open winter days, so soon as the spin he loved was finished, I slid off him, slipped the bit from his mouth (leaving head-stall hanging about his neck), and left him free to nibble the juicy green grasses of some woodland glade and, between nibble times, to spin me yarns of his experiences. For the subtle sympathy that existed between us—sprung of our trust in one another and sublimated in the heat of our mutual affection had sharpened our perceptions until intellectual inter-communication became possible to us. I know Sol understood all I told him, and I don't think I misunderstood much he told me. So here is his tale, as nearly as I can recall it.
"Ye know I'm Irish, and proud of it. It's there they knew best how to make and condition an able hunter. No pamperin', softenin' idleness in box stalls or fat pastures, or light road-joggin', goes in Ireland between huntin' seasons. It's muscle and wind we need at our trade in Ireland, and neither can be more than half diviloped in the few weeks' light conditionin' work that all English and most American cross-country riders give their hunters. Steady gruellin' work is what it takes to toughen sinews and expand lungs, and it's the Irish huntsman that knows it. So between seasons we drag the ploughs and pull the wains, toil at the rudest farm tasks, and thus are kept in condition on a day's notice to make the run or take the jump of our lives.
"Humiliatin'? Hardly, when we find it gives us strength and staying power to lead the best the shires can send against us: they've neither power nor stomach to take Irish stone and timber.
"'It's a royal line of blood, his,' I've often heard Sir Patrick say; 'a clean strain of the best for a hundred years, by records of me own family. His head? There was never a freak in the line till he came; and where the divil and by what misbegotten luck he came by it is the mystery of Roscommon. And it's by that same token we call him Avenger, for no sneerin' stranger ever hunted with him that didn't get the divil's own peltin' with clods off his handy Irish heels.'
"And the head groom had it from the butler and passed it on to me that the old Master of the Roscommon Hounds was ever swearin' over his third bottle, of hunt nights, when I was no more than a five-year-old and the youngsters would be fleerin' at Sir Pat over the shape of me head:
"'Faith, an' it's Avenger's head ye don't like, lads, is it? By the powers o' the holy Virgin but it's me pity ye have that none of ye can show the likes in your stables. By the gray mare that broke King Charlie's neck, it's the head of him holds brains enough to distinguish ten average hunters, brains no ordinary brain pan could hold; an' it's a brain-box shape of a shot sock makin' the disfigurin' hump below his eyes. It's a four-legged gineral is Avenger, with the cunnin' foresight of a Bonaparte and the cool judgment of a Wellington.'
"Ah! but they were happy days on the old sod, buckin' timber, flyin' over brooks, stretchin' over stone or lightin' light as bird atop of walls too broad to carry and springin' on, with a good light-handed man up that knew his work and left ye free to do yours! And a sad night it was for me when Sir Pat, stripped by years of gambling of all he owned but the clothes he stood in and me, staked and lost me to a hunt visitor from Quebec!
"I was a youngster then, only a nine-year-old, but I'll niver forget the two weeks' run from Queenstown to Quebec whereon hunting tables were reversed and I became the rider and the ship me mount, across country the roughest hunter ever lived through: niver a moment of easy flat goin', but an endless series of gigantic leaps that nigh jouted me teeth loose, churned me insides till they wouldn't even hold dry feed, and gave me more of a taste than I liked of what I had been givin' Roscommon huntsmen over lane side wall jumps—a rise and a jolt, a rise and a jolt, till it was wonderin' I was the ears were not shaken from me head.