“I thanked him, but told him I was going over. I was young, boys, and the picture of the old Major’s parlor with the big wood fire sending sparks up the chimney and then dying down to adjust the shadowy light necessary for the ring scene and the tableau act, was too much for my youthful head.
“‘But can that horse there swim?’ said the Southerner, with a more serious expression. ‘It isn’t every horse that can, my young frien’, an’ you had better know what he can do before you go into this mud-hole, sah.’
“‘Oh, I’ll soon teach him,’ I said, with one of those laughs that a man with more brass than sense is frequently caught indulging in. ‘He’ll have to swim or drown and you know he’ll swim before he’ll do that.’
“But right there is where I failed to size up that slanting-headed descendant of old Messenger.
“Well, the Southerner was very quiet and did not intrude his opinion on me further. He sized me up about right and decided to let me go it. The buggy was out of the question so I took old Crow out. Stripped him of everything but the bridle and put the lap robe on his back to help break the angularity of my seat. By the Southerner’s advice I pulled off my pants and underclothing, tying them around my shoulders, thrust my stockings in my upper coat pocket to keep them dry, tied my shoestrings together and threw my shoes over my shoulders, mounted my steed and spurred him with my trembling heels—for I was beginning to shake a little—into the slough. The stranger told me to let the horse have the bit and keep him to the right of a line of willows which he said skirted the road. By no means was I to jerk the beast, but guide him gently to right or left with the line.
“Right here, I want to explain to you that that horse had been listening to us and had decided that now was the time for him to suicide—a thought he had had in his mind for a year or two, I am sure. By doing the job now he expected to kill two birds with one stone, and I was the other bird—a jay at that—for, looking back at that roaring flood from the standpoint of fifteen years’ more sense, I am sure nobody but an idiot would ever have tried it. Well, we went in and I headed him for the willows, and the water crept up to my feet, then to my knees and was soon on the horse’s withers. Right here I expected to see him sail off with me on his back, his tail streaming out, his head on the wave, his ears laid back and his nostrils dilated and sending his steamy breath right and left; but not much of a sail he made. I forgot to tell you he had the longest neck I ever saw on a horse, but I didn’t know it was as long as it was, or I’d never have gone in that slough. Why, that neck was a telescope, and after he got me in up to the armpits he just lengthened it out a notch or two above the waves whenever he wanted to. I am not much on mathematics, but I saw that, as he then held it, it was fully six inches higher than the top of my hat, and I imagined I saw the faintest trace of a satanic grin on his under lip as he let her out another link and looked back at me, as much as to say:
“‘Well, how do you like swimming?”
“I reached for my pocket knife to cut his throat, but found I didn’t even have on my drawers, and just then the water gurgled up under my chin and splashed in my ears and that brute winked his left eye as he let out another notch in that old telescopic neck of his and walked along like he was on dress parade. By this time we were half-way across, and nothing but my nose was out. I was just thinking of getting up on his back on my knees, when he stepped in a little washout and my head went under like a cork. I turned loose everything to get air again, and was swept off before I could say ‘Scat.’ I grasped a willow just as I heard the stranger, who had been sitting on a big, sloping-shouldered gray Hal pacer, hello to me to hold on, and his horse soon swam out to the willow as naturally as if he had done it every day for a year. He circled in about forty feet of water before reaching me, and, telling me to catch his horse by the tail, he swam quietly by and I lost no time in doing as he said and getting back to land. I lost my ten-dollar pants, but this was more than offset by the hundred-dollars’ worth of common sense I had tucked away in my head on the different ways in which horses swim.
“And that horse—well, we sat on the bank and watched that head go leisurely across, lengthening out when it struck a washout and contracting on the ridges, with that same ironical grin part—the ugliest mouth I ever saw on a horse. At last he struck the bridge, clambered up, shook himself like a wet dog, looked back to see if I was taking it all in, and struck out to the Major’s on his own hook.