How the old horse won in days of yore!
—John Trotwood Moore.
“Seeing an article in a turf paper about pacing horses being natural swimmers,” remarked a friend to Trotwood a few days ago, “reminds me of an experience I had a dozen years ago down in the piney woods of Alabama, that convinced me that whether a pacer is a born swimmer or not, one thing is certain, the trotting horse I was driving that February day didn’t act like he was a South Sea Islander, by any means.
“You see,” he said, as a companionable crowd of horsemen gathered around him, and passed around the cigar box, as a sign that a story was about to begin, “I had been courting down in that state and made up my mind that I wanted to marry a blue-eyed, pretty daughter of old Major Blank, and I had about half way convinced the girl that she wanted to marry me, when this infernal non-swimming horse had about upset the whole thing. I hadn’t seen the girl for about a month, so I boarded the cars one bright day in February for a short visit. I took precaution to get the best ring I could find in Nashville within my means—I knew the fit of her finger pretty well—and I was as dead certain of leaving that ring in Alabama on the fourth finger of a dimpled hand as I am to-day that little Robert J. could pace round a draft horse.
“I stopped at a small town, ten miles from where she lived in the country, at the house of a friend of mine, for I had to hire a buggy and drive through to the Major’s, as he lived off the railroad. According to agreement, the young lady had written me a letter to that point, telling me how glad they all would be to see me, accenting the “all,” and ending up with a message that made my heart beat like a thumped horse, and enclosing a bunch of violets tied with a few deshabille strands of her own sunset hair. By the way, this was in February as I remarked, but what was the name of that poet that said, ‘love comes like a summer’s sigh?’
“Well, that letter made it July with me.
“I would have been a married man with an interesting family to-day,” he remarked after a pause, with a sigh, “if that friend of mine hadn’t been so everlastingly clever. He had a dish-faced trotter he had bought up in Kentucky, at one of Shanklin’s sales, that could go a mile in that Alabama sand in about five minutes, and do it with such a rip and tear and splutter and dirt throwing that you would think he was trotting ’round the world in eighty days. I had often bragged on the beast, just to please my clerking friend, who thought I knew every trotting horse personally, in the world, and now I got in to it by being so complimentary. Nothing would do but I must drive that old, shying, crow-hopping fool. And I had it to do. After I got him out of town he quit shying at the tree shadows and the black-jack stumps on the road side, and I thought I was getting along pretty well. Considering the fact that I was looking into a pair of blue eyes all the way, and putting a ring on an imaginary finger every mile I went, while the trusting hand to which it was attached nestled coyly between my two big ones, and I smelt the sweet perfume of violets in a wavy mass of auburn hair that nestled, in my mind’s eye, on my breast, I got along without any other accident; but was about to drive into a pretty rapid sheet of water in my dreaming, and perhaps end my own and Old Crow’s—the horse’s—career at the same time, when I heard a gruff voice with true Southern accent and a native nonchalance, say:
“‘You doan’t wanter go in washin’ this early in the season, do you, sah?”
“Well, I didn’t, and I waked up in time to stop the fool horse and back him out. The stranger watched me get out and then proceeded to tell me what I hadn’t had sense enough to see before—that Raccoon Creek was on a boom and Dead Deer Slough, into which I was driving, would swim a horse most anywhere. Now, a slough, in the far South, is a low, marshy place near the borders of a creek or lake, and, while generally dry in summer, in winter it manages to get plenty of water from the overflowing creek or lake nearby. This one ran directly across the road leading up to the foot of the bridge spanning Raccoon Creek beyond, and, though the bridge was partly under water, I could see it was all right and fully half of it, on the highest curve, was clear of water. Moreover, the other part was built on the bluff side of the creek and seemed to be entirely clear. So if I could only get to the bridge I would be all right.
“‘You had better give it up to-day, sah, and wait till mornin’,’ said the stranger, who appeared much interested in my movements. ‘The slough will run down by then, and you can get on the bridge easy. If there are no stoops in it’—I afterwards learned that stoops meant holes washed out by the water—‘you will find no trouble getting over. I’ll take keer of you, sah,’ he added, with true Southern hospitality, ‘for I want somebody to play euchre with to-night. It’s been raining for five days, and I knew old Rack would be scudding along, so I just rode down here to watch her, sah.’