“You can have your choice of any of the lot,” he said, “except that gray. She’s my special saddle horse. And between you and me, I figgered out that she must have some of the same blood that’s in White Smoke. Anyway, her mother was gray… almost white… and that mare came from the same district where White Smoke has been raising the devil the last year or two.”
I asked him what White Smoke was, and he seemed a little surprised to learn I hadn’t heard the name. He said that he thought nearly everyone in the world must have heard about White Smoke at one time or another. At least, everyone west of the Mississippi.
I was often surprised in this way by the talk of the prairie men. They had lived out there so long that they had forgotten the ways of the rest of the world, and they had forgotten the size of it, too. They finally came to have the viewpoint of the Indians who never could really understand that there were more white people in existence than there were Indians. It made no difference how one talked of cities and nations. I have seen a great chief wave his hand at a village of five hundred teepees and speak as though there were no greater city in existence. And so, in a way, it was with the prairie men.
Chuck explained about White Smoke in detail. He was a great white stallion with four black-stockinged legs. The horse had first appeared about three years before - that is, it had grown up to maturity at about that time. Since then it had done all sorts of damage by running off the horses of Indians and the stock of caravans. No one could be safe unless his horses were hobbled, and that was an immense nuisance. Over a district a thousand miles wide men watched their horses every night for fear of White Smoke. For he would steal down a gully with the cunning of a wolf, leap in among the horses, and startle them away with his great clarion neigh. Once off at his heels, he knew how to lead them where they could not be easily pursued. He kept with him a band composed of a hundred or more of the finest mares that were anywhere to be found, for they were the weeded-out result of a thousand chases. They had enough food to keep away from the relayed chasing of the Indians and the whites as well. It had come to such a point that, when a man wanted a specially fine mount, he tried to get one of White Smoke’s mares, and Chuck Morris told me that some men had traveled hundreds of miles trying to run down one of the stallion’s band.
This mare of Chuck’s, whether she was of that famous strain or not, was a pure beauty with the strength of a tiger and the eye of a lamb. When I looked at her, horseflesh for the first time entered my soul. And those who taste the lotus are no more condemned to dreams and yearning than are those who have lost their hearts to horses, waiting for the perfect horse to jog over the horizon into their lives. I knew, however, that I could not ride her. I told Chuck that I was no good in the saddle, that I didn’t know a horse well enough to attempt to select one, but, if he chose to give me the gentlest animal of his quartet, I’d pay him my fifty dollars as a first installment and more money later. He wouldn’t take a cent of money, though it must have been like parting from his own flesh and sinews to give up a horse to me. Every one of that quartet was worth more than two hundred dollars - in a day when a dollar meant many times over what it means in this reign of millionaires. And Chuck Morris was only eighteen. However, he did give me a horse, and it was the second best of his lot. It was a brown gelding with a white left forefoot and a big, wakeful eye. I felt that horse had brains I could trust, and I was delighted with the choice. Chuck gave me an old bridle, too, and Chris Hudson gave me a saddle that was rather in tatters. Gregory himself, who was the captain of the caravan, gave me some blankets and some good advice, every word of which I forgot.
In short, the entire caravan, young and old, treated me like a king simply because I had shown some spunk in standing up to big Chuck Morris. But after my boy’s life spent like a hunted beast half the time and like a beast of burden the rest, God alone can understand what that warmth of human kindness meant to me or how my whole heart responded to it and opened up. I loved the men, and I loved the country they came from. The very word West has always brought joy to me from that first happy time.
In the meantime we drudged forward. No one can appreciate the incalculable slowness of a caravan. In a pinch the whole progress could have been multiplied. Most of the horses were in good condition, and most of the wagons were sound. We could have rustled away across the prairies at an excellent clip, but the leaders wished to keep a good deal of strength in reserve to be mustered in case of need. Besides, at the slightest cause of alarm or the very hint of Indians, the crawling snail drew in its horns, stopped, curled up, and prepared for an attack. Once we lay for an entire day and a half, scouting the country busily in search of Indians, and all because one boy, riding alone, thought that he had seen one creeping through the grass.
By the time we had issued from the borderland of hills and ravines and noisy little streams rushing through narrow gorges, and by the time we had left the last trees behind and were committed to the true prairie, I had had time to recover from the last of my bruises. I had learned to ride, and I had made a poor beginning in the handling of a horse-hair lariat. And, above all, I was enjoying the purest happiness, for at the suggestion of Chris Hudson I was appointed huntsman to serve with Chuck Morris.
Among the hills it was well enough to scour here and there, and a fair share of the luck fell to me - or a little more than a fair share. For, as I have said, I had learned to make bullets count, which simply means that I had learned not to miss. Chuck, genius though he was with a gun in a crisis, was always too careless. However, the game we shot we always brought in together, and neither made any claims. I never boasted, and I think that Chuck was grateful for my silence. He, as head huntsman, received the praise, and I let him take it as a very cheap way of paying off that expensive horse on which I was riding. I never could understand, however, the way in which he would accept tributes that were not his due. He was generous to a fault. Money or any other possession was nothing to him, if it would please a friend. At the same time he hated to hear others praised. That was only one of the first peculiarities I was to observe in that remarkable man. By then, however, we had embarked at last on the vast sea of the prairies.
PRAIRIE DANGERS
I realized suddenly that we were in a new world. Chuck and I had ridden foolishly far the preceding evening in pursuit of a wounded deer. We had spent half of the night in getting back to the caravan, so that, when the morning came and the caravan lurched ahead, he and I tumbled into a wagon and rode on through most of the morning. When we crawled out from under canvas at last, thoroughly slept out, I found around me a huge green ocean where all the waves were frozen in place - soft swells of ground and then irregular long stretches over which the sun rippled. Nothing lived here but the wind and the grass. And the face of every man around me was changed, just as faces change on board ship when the land drops below the horizon and the vessel is committed to the sea at last. I cannot define the change. But at first everyone was more subdued, more watchful, with a strain of anxiety beginning to tell. Perhaps it was the gradual cessation of talk that wakened both Chuck and me.
I was a bit oppressed, at first. But half an hour later Chuck and I were riding out to find fresh meat. When we had pressed on into the silence beyond the sound of the rattling caravan, it seemed to me, looking around to the great horizon, that I felt the curve of the earth’s surface, pressing us up closer to the sky. The sky itself became my intimate, so that, half the time, I rode with my face up, watching the sweep of little wind-torn clouds. I looked at Chuck, smiling, and Chuck smiled back at me. We were like two children and very happy. I knew in that moment that this was the life for which I was meant, and I could see, as I stared around me, what had made Chuck Morris the man he was.