"What are you saying, Ross?" asked Mrs. Meadows, rousing herself.
"I say, suppose I'd just come down from the moon, or some place where they don't know a man from a horse, and you said to me: 'Look at these things, and then look at them things over there, and say which is boss of t'other.' Why, I'd say them things, every time." Ross pointed without any prejudice to the horses.
"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Meadows, "if these Coxeys had been taken care of and coddled all their lives like them troop horses, they might not be so handsome, but they'd look a good deal better than what they do. And they'd have more sense," she added in a lower voice. "Very few poor men's sons get the training those horses have had. They've learned to mind, for one thing, and to be faithful to the hand that feeds them."
"Not all of them don't," said Ross, shaking his head wisely. "There's kickers and biters and shirks amongst them; but if they won't learn and can't learn, they get 'condemned.'"
"And what becomes of them then?"
"Why, you know," answered the boy, who began to suspect that there was a moral looming in the distance of this bold generalization.
"Yes," said Mother Meadows, "I know what becomes of some of them, because I've seen; and I don't think a condemned horse looks much better in the latter end of him than a condemned man."
"But you can't leave them in the troop, for they'd spoil all the rest," objected the boy.
"It's too much for me, dear," replied the old woman humbly. "These Coxeys are a kind of folks I don't understand."
"I should think you might understand, when the troops have to go out and run 'em in! I'm on the side of the soldiers, every time."