“I call it shameful unfairness,” growled the nigh horse of the pair. “She doesn’t keep you up till two or three in the morning at balls and cotillions. She doesn’t so much as ride you in the park, as she does Lassie or Bubbles. When you haven’t done a step of work in six years, and spend your summers out in the pasture and your winters in a box-stall eating your head off, why should you get a double portion?”
“Yes,” whinnied Bubbles, plaintively; “and, what’s more, she always kisses you.”
Reveille, who meantime had swallowed his first apple, looked up with a lofty smile of superiority. Then he slowly winked his off eye, remarked, “Naturally, you don’t understand it,” and fell to lipping his second apple caressingly, previous to the decisive crunch. “See if that doesn’t drive the women wild,” he cogitated, with a grin.
“Now isn’t that just like a man!” complained Lassie. “As if it wasn’t enough to get more than his share, but he must go and have a secret along with it.”
“Huh!” grunted the polo pony, who was, of necessity, the brains-carrier of the stable; “if it’s family property, it can’t be much of a secret; for I never heard of anything to which six humans were privy that didn’t at once become town gossip. And they must be aware of it, for, from the Major to the Minor, they discriminate in favor of Reveille in a manner most reprehensible.” The polo pony was famous for the choiceness of his language and the neatness of his wit; but he was slightly vain, as was shown by his adding: “Pretty good, that, eh? Major—that’s the man we take out riding or driving. Minor—that’s the three-year-old. Do you hitch up to that post?”
“Do they all know your secret, Reveille?” asked Lassie, ingratiatingly.
“They think they do,” replied the veteran. “They don’t, though,” he added; and then, heaving a sigh, he continued: “But the roan filly did, and Mr. Lewis’s big grey, and dear old Sagitta—that was the Russian wolf-hound, who died before any of you youngsters joined our set.”
“Then I fail to perceive,” remarked the polo pony, “why they should treat you differently, if they are ignorant of the circumstances to which you refer.”
“My dear colt,” retorted Reveille, “when you are grown to horsehood you will learn that we are all governed by our imaginations, and not by our knowledge. Why do you shy at a scrap of white paper? Superficially because you are nearly related to an ass, actually because your fancy makes it into a white elephant.”
“And how about your putting your head and tail up, and careering all over the home lot, last summer, just because our Major fired his revolver at a hawk? Were you an ass, too?” saucily questioned one of the cobs.