“Wait,” cried Buster John; “I want to talk to you.”
“Shucks and smutty nubbins!” exclaimed the Pony. “You can hardly talk to yourselves. I don’t want you about me. All you can do is to throw rocks and poke sticks at me through the fence. Go away. I might accidentally hurt you. I wouldn’t be sorry if I did, but they’d send me off to the river place, and I don’t want to go there and get curkle burrs in my mane and tail.”
“But I can talk to you,” persisted Buster John. “I can understand everything you say.”
The Gray Pony tossed his head contemptuously. “Go off—go off. Yonder comes Aaron. The Son of Ben Ali will make you let me alone.”
Sure enough, Aaron was coming along the orchard path with a bucket of bran. Presently he called the Gray Pony. “Come, Gristle, come.”
The Pony kicked up his heels, shook his head, and went galloping toward Aaron as hard as he could go. When the children came up to where the Pony was eating his bran, they found him disputing with Aaron. If the children didn’t know how to talk to him day before yesterday, how could they talk now? That’s what he’d like to know.
“Gristle, listen! If you didn’t have this bran-mash an hour ago, how can you be sticking your nose in it now? That’s what I’d like to know.”
The Pony snorted so hard that he blew the wet bran all around. “How did they learn to talk to us?” he asked.
“They have been touched,” replied Aaron.