When he was six years old the horse Bucephalus went forth to race and conquer at the great spring race meeting at Columbus, Ohio. He won two heats of the trotting free-for-all—the great race of the meeting—with heavy Harry in the sulky and then faltered. A gelding named “Light o’ the Orient” beat him in the next heat. Tom, then a lad of sixteen, was put into the sulky and the two of them, horse and boy, fought out a royal battle with the gelding and a little bay mare, that hadn’t been heard from before but that suddenly developed a whirlwind burst of speed.
The big stallion and the slender boy won. From amid a mob of cursing, shouting, whip-slashing men a black horse shot out and a pale boy, leaning far forward, called and murmured to him. “Go on, boy! Go boy! Go boy!” the lad’s voice had called over and over all through the race. Bucephalus got a record of 2.06¼ and Tom Edwards became a newspaper hero. His picture was in the Cleveland Leader and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and when he came back to Bidwell we other boys fairly wept in our envy of him.
Then it was however that Tom Edwards fell down from his high place. There he was, a tall boy, almost of man’s stature and, except for a few months during the winters when he lived on the Whitehead farms, and between his sixth and thirteenth years, when he had attended a country school and had learned to read and write and do sums, he was without education. And now, during that very fall of the year of his triumph at Columbus, the Bidwell truant officer, a thin man with white hair, who was also superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School, came one afternoon to the Whitehead stables and told him that if he did not begin going to school both he and his employer would get into serious trouble.
Harry Whitehead was furious and so was Tom. There he was, a great tall slender fellow who had been with race horses to the fairs all over Northern Ohio and Indiana, during that very fall, and who had just come home from the journey during which he had driven the winner in the free-for-all trot at a Grand Circuit meeting and had given Bucephalus a mark of 2.06¼.
Was such a fellow to go sit in a schoolroom, with a silly school book in his hand, reading of the affairs of the men who dealt in butter, eggs, potatoes and apples, and whose unnecessarily complicated business life the children were asked to unravel,—was such a fellow to go sit in a room, under the eyes of a woman teacher, and in the company of boys half his age and with none of his wide experience of life?
It was a hard thought and Tom took it hard. The law was all right, Harry Whitehead said, and was intended to keep noaccount kids off the streets but what it had to do with himself Tom couldn’t make out. When the truant officer had gone and Tom was left alone in the stable with his employer the man and boy stood for a long time glumly staring at each other. It was all right to be educated but Tom felt he had book education enough. He could read, write and do sums, and what other book-training did a horseman need? As for books, they were all right for rainy evenings when there were no men sitting by the stable door and talking of horses and races. And also when one went to the races in a strange town and arrived, perhaps on Sunday, and the races did not begin until the following Wednesday—it was all right then to have a book in the chest with the horse blankets. When the weather was fine and the work was all done on a fine fall afternoon, and the other swipes, both niggers and whites, had gone off to town, one could take a book out under a tree and read of life in far away places that was as strange and almost as fascinating as one’s own life. Tom had read “Robinson Crusoe,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Tales from the Bible,” all of which he had found in the Whitehead house and Jacob Friedman, the school superintendent at Bidwell, who had a fancy for horses, had loaned him other books that he intended reading during the coming winter. They were in his chest—one called “Gulliver’s Travels” and the other “Moll Flanders.”
And now the law said he must give up being a horseman and go every day to a school and do little foolish sums, he who had already proven himself a man. What other schoolboy knew what he did about life? Had he not seen and spoken to several of the greatest men of this world, men who had driven horses to beat world records, and did they not respect him? When he became a driver of race horses such men as Pop Geers, Walter Cox, John Splan, Murphy and the others would not ask him what books he had read, or how many feet make a rod and how many rods in a mile. In the race at Columbus, where he had won his spurs as a driver, he had already proven that life had given him the kind of education he needed. The driver of the gelding “Light o’ the Orient” had tried to bluff him in that third heat and had not succeeded. He was a big man with a black mustache and had lost one eye so that he looked fierce and ugly, and when the two horses were fighting it out, neck and neck, up the back stretch, and when Tom was tooling Bucephalus smoothly and surely to the front, the older man turned in his sulky to glare at him. “You damned little whipper-snapper,” he yelled, “I’ll knock you out of your sulky if you don’t take back.”
He had yelled that at Tom and then had struck at the boy with the butt of his whip—not intending actually to hit him perhaps but just missing the boy’s head, and Tom had kept his eyes steadily on his own horse, had held him smoothly in his stride and at the upper turn, at just the right moment, had begun to pull out in front.
Later he hadn’t even told Harry Whitehead of the incident, and that fact too, he felt vaguely, had something to do with his qualifications as a man.
And now they were going to put him into a school with the kids. He was at work on the stable floor, rubbing the legs of a trim-looking colt, and Bucephalus was in his stall waiting to be taken to a late fall meeting at Indianapolis on the following Monday, when the blow fell. Harry Whitehead walked back and forth swearing at the two men who were loafing in chairs at the stable door. “Do you call that law, eh, robbing a kid of the chance Tom’s got?” he asked, shaking a riding whip under their noses. “I never see such a law. What I say is Dod blast such a law.”