Her horses were sticks of the size of canes, and of all sorts and colors. Each one had a name. How she selected them, and why she selected them out of the vast world of sticks, was a mystery to John Dutcher.
The brown stick she called Dan, the fork handle, Nellie, and the crooked stick with the big knot was Barney. She had from six to ten and she never forgot their names. Each had a string for a bridle and they all were placed in stalls, which she built with infinite labor and calculation out of twigs. She led each stick by its halter up to the manger (a rail) on which she had placed oats and grass. She talked to them.
"Now, Barney, whoa-whoa there now! Don't you kick Kit again—now sir! Kit, you better stand over here by Pete—Barney, you need exercise, that's what you need—yessir."
She exercised them by riding them in plunging circles about the fields, forgetting, with the quick imagination of a child, that she was doing all the hard work of the riding with her own stout, brown legs. It was a pleasure to John to have her there though he said little to her.
Often at night as he saw her lying asleep, her long lashes upon her roughened sun-burned skin, his heart went out to her in a great gush of tenderness. His throat ached and his eyes grew wet as he thought how unresponsive he had been that day. His remorseful memory went back over her eager questions to which he had not replied. Dear, sweet, restless little heart! And then he vowed never to lose patience with her again. And sometimes standing there beside her bed his arms closed about the little mound under the quilts, and his lips touched the round, sleep-enraptured face. At such times his needy soul went out in a cry to his dead wife for help to care for his child.
He grew afraid of the mystery and danger of coming womanhood. Her needs came to him more powerfully each day.
When she began going to school with the other children the effects of her lonely life and of her companionship with her father set her apart from the boys and girls of her own age and placed her among those several years older, whom she dominated by her gravity and her audacity. She was not mischievous or quarrelsome, but she was a fearless investigator. She tested their childish superstitions at once.
When they told her that if she swore at God and shook her fist at the sky she would certainly drop dead, she calmly stepped forward and shook her little fist up at the sun and swore, while the awe-stricken children cowered like a covey of partridges.
"There! you see that's a lie," she said scornfully. "God can't kill me—or else he don't care."
She went on exploding these strange superstitious fancies, which are only the survivals in civilized children of savage ancestry. She stood erect in the door of the school-house when she was eight years old, and pointed her hand at the lightning while the teacher sat cowed and weeping at her desk.