TO MY PLAYMATE

Once upon a time two children read aloud together more or less of Darwin, Spencer, Lyell, Goethe, Carlyle, Taine, and other writers of equal note. Though the books were somewhat above their comprehension, and certainly not so well suited to their years as fairy-tales and romances, both the choice and the rejection were deliberately made and consistently maintained. The discrimination originated neither in excessive fondness of fact, nor in the slightest dislike of fiction; being solely due to a greater preference for the stories they themselves created than for those they found in books. Presently, one of these two, having found a new playfellow, stopped inventing and acting and living their joint imaginings, and the other one had to go on playing by himself. But he has never forgotten the original impulse, and so, in collecting the offspring of some of his earliest and some of his latest play-hours, his vithoughts recur to the years of the old partnership, and he cannot please himself better than by putting his playmate, where she truly belongs, at the beginning of

his “imaginary” playthings.

NOTE

“His Version of It” is reprinted in this form by permission of the Century Company.

“The Cortelyou Feud” is reprinted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.

HIS VERSION OF IT

“She’s a darling!” exclaimed the bay mare, between munches of the big red apple.

“That’s just what she is!” responded the off carriage-horse; and then, as part of his apple fell to the floor, he added fretfully: “I do wish, Lassie, that you girls wouldn’t talk to a fellow when he’s doing something! You’ve made me lose half my apple!”

Old Reveille, with the prudence of twenty-eight years of experience, carefully deposited the unmasticated fraction of his apple beside an uneaten one in his manger before remarking reflectively: “She’s a thoroughbred; but she’s not the beauty her mother was at the same age.”

4“Fie!” reproved one of the cobs: “how can you be so ungallant, when she always gives you an extra apple or piece of sugar?”

“I call it shameful unfairness,” growled the nigh horse of the pair. “She doesn’t keep you up till two or three in the morning at balls and cotillions. She doesn’t so much as ride you in the park, as she does Lassie or Bubbles. When you haven’t done a step of work in six years, and spend your summers out in the pasture and your winters in a box-stall eating your head off, why should you get a double portion?”

“Yes,” whinnied Bubbles, plaintively; “and, what’s more, she always kisses you.”

Reveille, who meantime had swallowed his first apple, looked up with a lofty smile of superiority. Then he slowly winked his off eye, remarked, “Naturally, you don’t understand it,” and fell to lipping his second apple caressingly, previous to the decisive crunch. “See if that 5doesn’t drive the women wild,” he cogitated, with a grin.

“Now isn’t that just like a man!” complained Lassie. “As if it wasn’t enough to get more than his share, but he must go and have a secret along with it.”

“Huh!” grunted the polo pony, who was, of necessity, the brains-carrier of the stable; “if it’s family property, it can’t be much of a secret; for I never heard of anything to which six humans were privy that didn’t at once become town gossip. And they must be aware of it, for, from the Major to the Minor, they discriminate in favor of Reveille in a manner most reprehensible.” The polo pony was famous for the choiceness of his language and the neatness of his wit; but he was slightly vain, as was shown by his adding: “Pretty good, that, eh? Major—that’s the man we take out riding or driving. Minor—that’s the three-year-old. Do you hitch up to that post?”

“Do they all know your secret, Reveille?” asked Lassie, ingratiatingly.

6“They think they do,” replied the veteran. “They don’t, though,” he added; and then, heaving a sigh, he continued: “But the roan filly did, and Mr. Lewis’s big grey, and dear old Sagitta—that was the Russian wolf-hound, who died before any of you youngsters joined our set.”

“Then I fail to perceive,” remarked the polo pony, “why they should treat you differently, if they are ignorant of the circumstances to which you refer.”

“My dear colt,” retorted Reveille, “when you are grown to horsehood you will learn that we are all governed by our imaginations, and not by our knowledge. Why do you shy at a scrap of white paper? Superficially because you are nearly related to an ass, actually because your fancy makes it into a white elephant.”

“And how about your putting your head and tail up, and careering all over the home lot, last summer, just because our Major fired his revolver at a hawk? Were you an ass, too?” saucily questioned one of the cobs.

7“Probably,” assented the oldster, genially; “for that very incident proves my point. What that shot reminded me of was the last time I heard my Major fire his revolver. I saw a long, gentle slope, up which a brigade of ‘secesh’ were charging to a railroad embankment protected by a battery of twelve-pounders firing six rounds of case-shot to the minute. And I was right among the guns again, seeing and hearing it all; and my Major—only he was a captain then—was saying as coolly and quietly as he orders the carriage now: ‘Steady, men, steady! There’s a hundred yards yet, and they can’t stand it to the finish. Double charge with canister! Three more rounds will settle them.’ Which was just what it did. We horses, with the aid of the men and guns, held the Weldon railroad, and Lee and his mules stopped holding Richmond.”

“Doesn’t he tell a story beautifully?” remarked Bubbles, in a distinctly audible aside to Lassie.

8“I’ve never known a better raconteur,” answered Lassie, in a stage whisper of equal volume.

“Lay you a peck of oats to a quart that the girls get that secret out of him,” whispered the Majors saddle-horse, who, as a Kentuckian of thoroughbred stock, had sporting and race-track proclivities.

“Not with me!” denied the second cob. “Besides, no gentleman ever bets on a certainty. Gaze at the self-satisfied look on the old fool’s phiz. Lord! how a pretty face and figure, combined with flattery, can come it round the old ones!”

There could be no doubt about it. Reveille was smirking, though trying not to desperately; and to aid his attempt, he went on, with a pretence of unconscious musing, as if he were still in the past: “Yes; we are ruled by our imaginations, and, consequently, though I have reached the honourable but usually neglected period in life which retires an officer and a horse from active service, I get a box-stall and extra rations and perquisites.”

9“How rarely is the story-telling faculty united with the philosophical mind!” soliloquised Bubbles to the rafters.

“And how rarely,” rejoined Lassie, “are those two qualities combined with a finished, yet graphic, style!”

“I would gladly tell you that story,” said the old war-horse, “but it isn’t one to be repeated. Every horse who isn’t a cow—to make an Irish bull, which, by the bye, is a very donkeyish form of joke—has done certain things that he has keenly regretted, even though he believes that he acted for the good—just as brave soldiers will act as spies, honourable lawyers defend a scoundrel, and good women give ‘at homes.’”

“What a decadence there has been in true wit!” remarked Lassie, apropos of nothing. “It is such a pleasure to be put next a horse at dinner whose idea of humour was formed before youthful pertness was allowed to masquerade as wit.”

“It is a mortification to me to this day,” went on Reveille, “even though the outcome 10has justified me. You know what our equine code of honour is—how we won’t lie or trick or steal or kill, as the humans do. Well, for nearly two months I was as false and tricky as a man.”

“I don’t believe it,” dissented Bubbles.

“The truly great always depreciate themselves,” asserted one of the mares.

“No, ladies, I speak the truth,” reiterated the warrior; “even now the memory galls me worse than a spur.”

“It would ease your conscience, I am sure,” suggested Bubbles, “to confess the wrong, if wrong there was. A highly sensitive and chivalric nature so often takes a morbidly extreme view of what is at most but a peccadillo.”

“This, alas! was no peccadillo,” sighed Reveille, “as you will acknowledge after hearing it.”

“I may be a colt, but I’m not a dolt,” sneered the polo pony to himself. “As if we weren’t all aware that the garrulous old fool has been itching to inflict his long tail upon us for the last ten minutes.”

11“My one consolation,” continued Reveille, “is that the roan filly was in the traces with me and an equal culprit in—”

“I thought that one of the sex of Adam would saddle it on a woman before he got through,” interjected the cob.

“Cherchez la femme!” laughed the polo pony, delighted to trot out his French.

“All I meant to suggest, ladies and gentlemen,” affirmed Reveille, reflectively, “is that a woman is an excuse for anything. If this world is a fine world, it is because she pulls the reins more often for good than for bad.”

“‘Those who always praise woman know her but little; those who always blame her know her not at all,’” quoted the worldly-wise Kentuckian.

Reveille swallowed the last fragment of his second apple, cleared his throat, and began:—

“It was after Five Forks, where my Captain got a major’s oak-leaf added to his shoulder-straps, and a Minié ball in his arm, that the thing began. When he 12came out of the hospital—long before he should have, for the bone had been shattered, and took its own time to knit—we hung about Washington, swearing at our bad luck, my Major suffering worse than a docked horse in fly-time from the little splinters of bone that kept working out, and I eating my head off in—”

“History does repeat itself,” murmured the envious carriage-horse.

“Well, one day, after nearly three months of idleness, when I was about dead with stalldom, I permitted the orderly to saddle me, and after a little dispute with him as to my preferences, I let him take me round to Scott Square. There for the first time I met the roan filly and the big grey. She was a dear!” he added, with a sigh, and paused a moment.

“Ah, don’t stop there!” begged one of the ladies.

“Get a gait on you,” exhorted the cob.

Reveille sighed again softly, shook his head, and then came back to the present.

“‘May you never lack for oats and 13grass,’ said I, greeting them in my most affable style.

“‘May you die in clover,’ responded the grey, nodding politely.

“‘May you have all the sugar you desire,’ added the filly, sweetly, and greeting me with a graceful toss of the head. That told me that a woman belonged to her, for men never give sugar. Sometimes, on a forced march, my Major used to divide his ration of hardtack with me; but I never tasted sugar until—well, we mustn’t get ahead too fast.”

“No danger, while he is doing the lipping,” grumbled the disagreeable cob.

“‘I see by your saddle that you are in the service,’ remarked the big grey. ‘I am not so fortunate. Between ourselves, I think the fellow I let ride me would do anything sooner than fight—though, now it’s all over, he says if he’d returned from Europe in time he should have gone into the army.’

“I shook my head dejectedly. ‘I’m very much off my feed,’ I told them. ‘My Major 14is not able to ride, and won’t be for a long time, so I’m horribly afraid I’ve been sold. I really wouldn’t have believed it of him!’

“‘What things man is capable of doing!’ sighed the filly, with tears of sympathy in her eyes.

“‘Cheer up, comrade,’ cried the grey, consolingly. ‘Even if you are sold, you might be worse off. You are still a saddle-horse, and as Miss Gaiety and I both have good stables, you probably will have the same luck, since you are in our set. The fellow I carry spurred my predecessor, when he was leg weary, at an impossible jump in Leicestershire, and because he fell short and spoiled his knees the brute ordered him sold, and he was put to dragging a huckster’s cart, besides being half starved. You’re not so bad off as that yet.’

“Just then three people came out of the house before which we were standing, and I can’t tell you how my heart jumped with joy, and how my ears went forward, when I saw that one of them was my Major. For the instant I was so happy that I felt 15like kicking up; but the next moment I was ready to die with mortification at the thought of how I had cheapened him to strangers. Think of my saying such things to them of the best man that ever lived!

“‘That’s my Major,’ I told them, arching my neck and flicking my tail with pride. ‘He held the Weldon railroad without—’”

“But you told us a little while ago,” protested Lassie, “that—”

“Yes, yes,” hastily broke in the story-teller with a note of deprecation in his voice. “Don’t you see, girls, that having just belittled him, I had to give him the credit of it, though really we horses—But there, I won’t go into that now.”

“That much is saved!” muttered the cob.

“Walpole,” said the polo pony, “well described a certain period of life when he denied that a man was in his dotage, but suggested that he was in his ‘anecdotage.’”

“It was far from my intention—” Reveille began, with dignity.

16“I do wish you would bridle your tongues, the two of you,” snapped Bubbles. “It’s just what I should expect of a colt that has never seen anything better than a poplar ball and a wooden mallet, and so dislikes to hear of real battles. Please pay no heed to him, Mr. Reveille.”

“We don’t notice either of them one curb or snaffle bit,” declared Lassie, “so why should you? Forgive me for interrupting you, and do tell us what you told the steeds about our Major?”

Reveille hesitated, and then resumed his tale: “‘His battery held the Weldon railroad without any infantry supports,’ I told them, adding, ‘Sheridan’s right-hand man. Perfect devil at fighting, and the kindest human in the world.’

“The roan filly, being a woman, answered: ‘He looks both;’ but the grey, being something more stupid, remarked: ‘Then what made you think he had sold you?’

“‘Dear Mr. Solitaire,’ cried the mare, ‘you must know that we all say things in 17society, not because we think them, but to make conversation. I knew Mr.—thank you, Mr. Reveille—was joking the moment he spoke.’ I tell you, gentlemen, women can put the blinders on facts when they really try!

“‘What do you think of my Felicia?’ asked Miss Gaiety.

“I had been so taken up with my dear that I hadn’t so much as looked at hers. But, oh, fellows, she was a beauty! Filly built, right through—just made to be shown off by a habit; hair as smooth as a mare’s coat, and as long and thick as an undocked tail; eyes—oh, well, halter it! there is no use trying to describe her eyes, or her nose, or her mouth, or her smile. She was just the dearest, loveliest darling that I ever did see!

“Mr. Lewis was putting her up, while my poor dear stood watching them, with a look in his face I had never seen. Now, when there was anything to be done, my Major was always the man who did it, and it puzzled me why he had let Mr. Lewis get 18the better of him. The next instant I saw that his right arm was still in a sling, and that his sword-sash was used to tie it to his body. Then I knew why he had an up-and-down line in his forehead, and why he bit his mustache.

“‘Can I give you any help, Major Moran?’ asked Mr. Lewis, when he had helped Miss Fairley mount.

“‘Thanks, no,’ answered my pal, rather curtly, I thought; and putting his left hand on me, into the saddle he vaulted. But he was foolish to do it, as he said ‘Ouch!’ below his breath; and he must have turned pale, for Miss Fairley cried out, ‘Mr. Lewis, quick! He’s going to faint!’

“‘Nothing of the kind,’ denied my backer, giving a good imitation laugh, even while his hand gripped my neck and I felt him swerve in the saddle. ‘Miss Fairley, I will not let even you keep me an interesting invalid. If there was any fighting left, I should long since have been ordered to the front by the surgeons; but now they wink their eyes at shirking.’

19“‘I told you you ought not to go, and now I’m sure of it,’ urged Miss Fairley. ‘You’ll never be able to control such a superb and spirited horse with only your left arm.’”

“Bet that’s a subsequent piece of embroidery,” whispered the polo pony to his nearest neighbor.

“Now, I have to confess that I had come out of the stable feeling full of friskiness, and I hadn’t by any means worked it off on the orderly, much of a dance as I’d given him. But the way I put a check-strap on my spirits and dropped my tail and ears and head was a circumstance, I tell you.

“‘There’s not the slightest cause for alarm,’ my confrère answered her. ‘The old scamp has an inclination to lose his head in battle, but he’s steady enough as a roadster.’

“‘I really wish, though, that you wouldn’t insist on coming,’ persisted Miss Fairley, anxiously. ‘You know—’

“‘Of course, Miss Fairley,’ interrupted 20my Major, with a nasty little laugh, ‘if you prefer to have your ride a solitude à deux, and I am in—’

“‘Shall we start?’ interrupted Miss Fairley, her cheeks very red, and her eyes blazing. She didn’t wait for an answer, but touched up the filly into a trot, and for the first mile or two not a word would she say to my colleague; and even when he finally got her to answer him, she showed that she wasn’t going to forget that speech.

“Well, what began like this went from bad to worse. He wasn’t even aware that he had been shockingly rude, and never so much as apologised for his speech. When Miss Fairley didn’t ask him to ride with them the next day, he ordered me saddled, and joined them on the road; and this he did again and again, though she was dreadfully cool to him. My dear seemed unable to behave. He couldn’t be himself. He was rude to Mr. Lewis, sulky to Miss Fairley, and kept a dreadful rein on me. That week was the only time 21in my life when he rode me steadily on the curb. My grief! how my jaw did ache!”

“I wish it would now,” interrupted the cob, sulkily. Let it be said here that horses are remarkably sweet-natured but this particular one was developing a splint, and was inevitably cross.

“Don’t be a nag,” requested one of the mares.

“The roan filly always blamed my Major for making such a mess of the whole thing; but even though I recognised how foolish he was to kick over the traces, I saw there were reasons enough to excuse him. In the first place, he enlisted when he was only nineteen, and having served straight through, he had had almost no experience of women. Then for six months he had been suffering terribly with his arm, with the result that what was left of his nerves were all on edge. He began to ride before he ought, and though I did my best to be easy, I suppose that every moment in the saddle must have caused him intense pain. 22Finally, he had entered himself for the running only after Mr. Lewis had turned the first mile-post and had secured the inside track. I really think, if ever a man was justified in fretting on the bit my chum was.