Horses Nine | Page 7

alarm. When Old Jeff was roused out of his accustomed jog by Calico's nervous snorts he looked up to see such a spectacle as he had never beheld in all his goings and comings up and down the Bangor road. Looming out of the mist was a six-horse team hitched to the most foreign-looking rig one could well imagine. It had something of the look of a preposterous hay-cart, with the ends of blue-painted poles sticking out in front and trailing behind. Following this was a great, white-swathed wheeled box drawn by four horses. It was certainly a curious affair, whatever it was, but neither Calico nor Old Jeff gave it much heed, nor did they waste a glance on the distant tail of the procession, for behind the wheeled box was a thing which held their gaze.
In the gray four o'clock light it seemed like an enormous cow that rolled menacingly forward; not as a cow walks, however, but with a swaying, heaving motion like nothing commonly seen on a Maine highway. Instinctively both horses thrust their muzzles toward the thing and sniffed. Without doubt Old Jeff was frightened. Perhaps not for nine generations had any of his ancestors caught a whiff of that peculiarly terrifying scent of which every horse inherits knowledge and dread.
As for Calico, he had no need of such spur as inherited terror. He had fearsomeness enough of his own to send him rearing and pawing the air until the whiffle-trees rapped his knees. Old Jeff did not rear. He stared and snorted and trembled. When he felt his mate spring forward in the traces he went with him, ready to do anything in order to get away from that heaving, swaying thing which was coming toward them.
"Whoa, ye pesky fools! Whoa, dod rot ye!" Uncle Enoch, wakened from the half doze which he had been taking on the wagon-seat, now began to saw on the lines. His shouts seemed to have aroused the heaving thing, for it answered with a horrid, soul-chilling noise.
By this time Calico was leaping frantically, snorting at every jump and forcing Old Jeff to keep pace. They were at the top of a long grade and down the slope the loaded wagon rattled easily behind them. Uncle Enoch did his best. With feet well braced he tugged at the lines and shouted, all to no purpose. Never before had Calico and Old Jeff met a circus on the move. Neither had they previously come into such close quarters with an elephant. One does not expect such things on the Bangor road. At least they did not. They proposed to get away from such terrors in the shortest possible time.
Now the public ways of Maine are seldom macadamized. In places they are laid out straight across and over the granite backbone of the continent. The Bangor road is thus constructed in spots. This slope was one of the spots where the bare ledge, with here and there six-inch shelves and eroded gullies, offered a somewhat uneven surface to the wheels. A well built Studebaker will stand a lot of this kind of banging, but it is not wholly indestructible. So it happened that half-way down the hill the left hind axle snapped at the hub. Thereupon some two hundred dozen ears of early green-corn were strewn along the flinty face of the highway, while Uncle Enoch was hurled, seat and all, accompanied by four dozen eggs and ten pounds of Aunt Henrietta's best butter, into the ditch.
When the circus caravan overtook him Uncle Enoch had captured the runaways and was leading them back to where the wrecked wagon lay by the roadside. More or less butter was mixed with the sandy chin whiskers and an inartistic yellow smooch down the front of his coat showed that the eggs had followed him.
"Rather lively pair of yours; eh, mister?" commented a red-faced man who dropped off the pole-wagon.
"Yes, ruther lively," assented Uncle Enoch, "'Specially when ye don't want 'em to be. The off one's stiddy enough. It's this cantankerous skewbald that started the tantrum. Whoa now, blame ye!" Calico's nose was in the air again and he was snorting excitedly.
"Lemme hold him 'till old Ajax goes by," said the circus man.
"Thank ye. I'll swap him off fust chance I git, ef I don't fetch back nuthin' but a boneyard skate," declared Uncle Enoch.
As Ajax lumbered by, the circus man eyed with interest the dancing Calico. He noted with approval the coat of fantastic design, the springy knees and the fine tail that rippled its white length almost to Calico's heels.
"I'll do better'n that by you, mister," said he. "I've got a fourteen-hundred pound Vermont Morgan, sound as a dollar, only eight years old and ain't afraid o' nothin'. I'll swap him even for