Dwellers in the Hills

by Melville Davisson Post

"He must have been in a hurry," said Ump.

"'Pears like it," responded the boatman, turning back into his house. "He lit out pretty brisk."

Ump shook the reins of his bridle and went by me in a gallop. The Cardinal passed at my knee, and I followed, bending over to keep the flying sand out of my eyes.

The moon was rising, a red wheel behind the shifting fog. And under its soft light the world was a ghost land. We rode like phantoms, the horses' feet striking noiselessly in the deep sand, except where we threw the dead sycamore leaves. My body swung with the motions of the horse, and Ump and Jud might have been a part of the thing that galloped under their saddles.

The art of riding a horse cannot be learned in half a dozen lessons in the academy on the avenue. It does not lie in the crook of the knee, or the angle of the spine. It does not lie in the make of the saddle or the multiplicity of snaffle reins, nor does it lie in the thirty-nine articles of my lady's riding-master. But it is embraced in the grasp of one law that may be stated in a line, and perhaps learned in a dozen years,—be a part of the horse.

The mastery of an art—be it what you like—does but consist in the comprehension of its basic law. The appreciation of this truth is indispensable. It cannot avail to ape the manner of the initiate. I have seen dapper youths booted and spurred, riding horses in the park, rising to the trot and holding the ball of the foot just so on the iron of the stirrup, and if the horse had bent his body they would have gone sprawling into the bramble bushes. Yet these youngsters believed that they were riding like her Majesty's cavalry, the ogled gallants of every strolling lass.

I have seen begloved clubmen with an English accent worrying a good horse that they understood about as well as a problem in mechanics or any line of Horace. And I have seen my lady sitting a splendid mount, with the reins caught properly in her fingers and her back as straight as a whip-staff, and I would have wagered my life that every muscle in her little body was as rigid as a rock, and her knee as numb as the conscience of a therapeutist.

Look, if you please, at the mud-stained cavalryman who has lived his days and his nights in the saddle; or the cattle drover who has never had any home but this pigskin seat, and mark you what a part of the horse he is. Hark back to these models when you are listening to the vapourings of a riding-master lately expatriated from the stables of Sir Henry. To ride well is to recreate the fabulous centaur of Thessaly.

We raced over the mile of sand road in fewer minutes than it takes to write it down here. There was another factor, new come into the problem, and we meant to follow it close. Expedition has not been too highly sung. An esoteric novelist hath it that a pigmy is as good as a giant if he arrive in time.

At the end of this mile, below Horton's Ferry, the road forks, and there stands a white signboard with its arms crossed, proclaiming the ways to the travelling stranger. The cattle Ward had bought were in two droves. Four hundred were on the lands of Nicholas Marsh, perhaps three miles farther down the Valley River, and the remaining two hundred a mile or two south of the crossroads at David Westfall's.