"Am I to ride that?" Whitey demanded, pointing at the jack.
"Sure," Chet replied. "Both of my hosses has glanders, but this jack's all right. I've rid him offen. You'll find him gentle an' perseverin' an' good comp'ny. Mebbe he does go a mite faster toward home than away from it, but he allus gets somewhere. His name's Felix, after a uncle o' mine what—"
Followed a personal history of Chet's uncle, to which Whitey did not listen. He was thinking of the figure he would cut arriving at the Star Circle on Felix, and hoped he would get there at night. Chet returned to the subject of the jack, to whose back a blanket was strapped.
"I'm sorry my saddles won't fit him," said Chet, "but you'll find sittin' on this blanket as comf'tbul as your mother's rockin'-chair, an' you've only sixty mile t' go."
"Sixty miles!" gasped Whitey.
"Thassall. Now you keep t' that road, with them hills t' your right, an' when you get t'—"
Chet described at length Whitey's route to the Star Circle Ranch. Sadly Whitey mounted Felix and set forth. Again the road proved little but a grass-grown wagon track through the rolling plain edged by the gray hills. And soon it seemed to Whitey that Chet had been over-enthusiastic when he said that Felix's back was easy as a rocking-chair. At first it might have seemed so, but after awhile it felt more like a rail fence.
And Whitey discovered peculiar traits in Felix. He constantly wanted to turn to the right, and had to be pulled back, and he was cold-jawed. And once in a while he would stop short, and when Whitey urged him on, would start in a despondent way, with his head down and his ears flopping, and would have to be kicked or whipped to be urged to do anything faster than a walk. It was all very discouraging.
Perhaps you never have seen a horse or a jack attached to the end of the pole of one of those old stone grinding-mills, around which he marches and marches, while the grain is ground between the whirling stones in the center. That was Felix's regular job, which accounted for many of his peculiarities—but Whitey never knew about it.
Among the interesting things about animals is their sense of time. Many of them seem to be as accurate as clocks and some of them as useful as calendars. One dog, in particular, comes to my mind, whom his master used to bathe on Sundays. And when this custom was firmly fixed in his—the pup's—mind, he would go away on Friday night and stay away till Monday morning. He got to be the dirtiest dog in town.