After that the two did get along peaceably enough, and Jonathan assured me that all horses had these little affairs. One day we drove over to the main street of the village on an errand.
“Will she stand?” I questioned.
“Better hitch her, perhaps,” said Jonathan, getting out the rope. He snapped it into her bit-ring, then threw the other end around a post and started to make a half-hitch. But as he drew up the rope it was suddenly jerked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Griselda’s patient head waving high above him on the end of an erect and rebellious neck, the hitch-rope waggling in loops and spirals in the air, and the whole outfit backing away from him with speed and decision. He was so astonished that he did nothing, and in a moment Griz had stopped backing and stood still, her head sagging gently, the rope dangling.
“Well—I’ll—be—” I didn’t try to remember just what Jonathan said he would be, because it doesn’t really matter. We both stared at Griz as if we had never seen her before. Griz looked at nothing in particular, she blinked long lashes over drowsy, dark eyes, and sagged one hip.
“She’s trying to make believe she didn’t do it—but she did,” I said.
“Something must have startled her,” said [pg 170] Jonathan, peering up and down the deserted street. Two roosters were crowing antiphonally in near-by yards, and a dog was barking somewhere far off.
“What?” I said.
“You never can tell, with a horse.”
“No, apparently not,” I said, smiling to myself; and I added hastily, as I saw Jonathan go forward to her head, “Don’t try it again, please! I’ll stay by her while you go in. Please!” For I had detected on Jonathan’s face a look that I very well knew. It was the same expression he had worn that Sunday he led the calf to pasture. He made no answer, but stood examining the hitch-rope.
“No use,” he said, quietly releasing it and tossing its coil into the carriage, “It’s too rotten. If it snapped, she’d be ruined.”