No protection about their heads and ears, for the long mane, intended for both use and beauty by the Creator, was gone, and sides, hips and legs were the feasting ground for stinging, blood-sucking insects; no long tail to switch them off. And then how they looked!
The poor things felt their disfigurement as well as their pain; they knew that they looked silly and ridiculous.
It was only a little while until they were utterly dispirited and all their style was gone.
Between hard driving, the discomfort of being docked, and the ailments induced by the over-draw check, they were old horses at the time they should have been in their prime, and rapidly they changed owners.
Before the end of Chet's year on the farm, the list of his cruelties culminated in what seemed to me to be the most dastardly deed of all.
Topsy, despite her hard life, was the faithful "stand-by." On her fell the major part of all the hard work.
Two years she had occupied the same stall; therefore, great was her surprise one evening, on being turned loose by the hired man in the yard, as was his custom with her, to find a strange horse in her place. However, the stall was wide, and, without making trouble, she took her place beside the intruder, and was bending her head to take up a bite of grass from the manger, when, with a furious oath, Chet rushed down the alley to the front of the manger, and, with a knotted stick, struck her in the face, the first blow half stunning her, the second one tearing the remaining eye from its socket, and crushing it on her cheek.
"There, you old fool, you haven't any eye now!" he said, with a brutal laugh.
Poor Topsy, launched into perpetual darkness!
She had said she would be thankful to keep one eye, and now that was gone. All that night she lay moaning in her stall, almost crazed with pain. Master never left her the long hours through. He had Chet arrested and fined $25, but that could not restore Topsy's sight.