Of evenings we would sit out in front with our chairs tilted back against the wall, Dal in his shirt sleeves, myself in a linen duster, and smoke and talk; or in the winter we would hug the stove in the office. It was interesting to hear Dal discourse on any subject whatever, from local politics to poetry. His favorite topic was the habits and peculiarities of his four-footed animals; he loved horses, and I am convinced understood them better than any other man that ever lived. At the time of this story, I remember, he had in the stable a “kicker,” a magnificent black beast, clean of limb and of glossy coat, but with a most vicious eye. Dal called him Mac; a contraction, as I remember it, of Machiavelli.
Dal had love in his heart even for Mac, and he would spend hours working with incredible patience to cure him of his vicious habit. His understanding of the creature’s psychology, or instinct, was almost uncanny. Without any apparent reason he would say to the hostlers some morning, after a leisurely tour of the stable, “Look out for Mac today, boys, he’s ready to fire.” And sure enough on the slightest provocation, or none whatever, the horse’s iron-shod hoofs would fly out most unexpectedly like a shot from a cannon, with the force of a dozen sledgehammers.
His method with balkers was simple but invariably effective; I had a chance to observe it once in the case of a bay mare he had got from a farmer north of town. We would be driving along at a slow trot or a walk when suddenly Dal would pull on the reins with a commanding “Whoa!” The mare would stop with apparent reluctance, and after we had sat there a minute or two Dal would slacken the reins and slap them on her back and off we would go.
“The idea of balking always enters a horse’s head when it is in motion, never when it’s standing still,” Dal would explain. “It is a double idea: 1 — stop; 2 — balk. The thing is, don’t let them stop, and the way to avoid it is to stop them yourself before they get a chance to do it of their own accord. That gets ’em confused, and naturally they give it up as a bad job.”
“But how do you know when they’re ready to begin operations?”
“I don’t know — something — the way they hold their head — you can tell—”
That is, he could tell. I grew to regard him as infallible on any question concerning an animal in harness or under a saddle. One thing was certain: he loved his horses better than he did his hostlers, though he understood them equally well; and I am not ready to quarrel with the preference.
It was one July afternoon, when Dal and I were seated together out in front that the individual known as H. E. Gruber first appeared on the scene. That was the name he gave Dal. We marked him for a new face in the town the moment we saw him glide past us with a curious gait, half furtive, half insolent, in through the door of the runway to the livery stable. I replied to Dal’s inquiring glance:
“Never saw him before.”
In a minute the stranger emerged again from the stable, approached me and spoke:
“The boys sent me out here. You the boss?”
I designated Dal by a nod of the head, and the stranger turned to him with the information that he wished to hire a rig. I took advantage of the opportunity to look him over. He had a sly, hard face, with mean little colorless eyes that shifted vaguely as he talked; his voice had a curious way of changing suddenly from a puny softness to a grating, rasping snarl. He looked to be somewhere in the fifties, and was dressed well, in a gray sack suit and black derby.
“Where do you want to go?” Dal inquired with a frown. It was plain that he, too, was unfavorably impressed with the man’s appearance.
The stranger replied that he wished to drive out to John Hawkins’s farm; and finally, after taking his name and inquiring concerning the extent of his experience with horses, Dal called to one of the boys to tell him to get out a single buggy. While that was being done the stranger, Gruber, inquired the way to his destination, and Dal described the route with the greatest care. He was always particular about those things; not so much, I believe, to serve his customers, as on account of the fact that when a man loses his way he becomes angry and usually takes it out on the horse.
“It’s good road all the way,” said Dal, as the rig was led out and Gruber climbed in. “You ought to make it in an hour. If you’re kept over suppertime John’ll look after the horse. John Hawkins always feeds his animals before he does himself.”
The stranger nodded, shook the reins and was off, with Nanny, one of me best mares in town, breaking into a smart trot the moment she hit the road.
Dal and I puffed for a couple of minutes in silence. The buggy had disappeared down the street when I took my cigar from my mourn to observe speculatively:
“Queer specimen.”
Dal nodded. “Yes. Can’t quite figure him out. Drummer? No. Looks like a backdoor politician. Probably from Denver. What the dickens does he want with old John Hawkins?”
The same query was in my own mind, for two men more totally different man the stranger Gruber and the farmer he was going to see would have been hard to find. John Hawkins had come to our part of the country some five years before, from where nobody knew, and bought the old Miller farm, paying all but a thousand dollars in cash. That last is a bit of inside information, for I was the lawyer who drew up the deed.
People laughed at him while they pitied him, for the Miller farm was the most notoriously bad quarter section in the township. But Hawkins soon showed them that if he possessed no knowledge of farmland and farming he at least knew how to work and learn. He found a book somewhere on fertilizers, and the second year he got a fair crop of corn on his west forty, though he nearly starved doing it. The third year was better still, and he began then to make money from his poultry, too. People learned to respect and admire him, all the more because he had earned the reputation of being the hardest worker in the country; and yet he couldn’t have been a day less than fifty-five, with his medium-sized stooping figure, gray hair, and furrowed, careworn countenance. He was a silent, reserved man, with a look of grim submission in his steady brown eyes that at times startled you with its pathos.
A certain portion of the community was particularly interested in his poultry; and you will understand what that portion was when you learn that the poultry was under the special care of Hawkins’s daughter. Her name was Janet. The best possible advertisement for the purposes of the “back to the farm” propagandists would be a card containing photographs, after the fashion of patent medicine ads, of Janet Hawkins “before” and “after.” When she first appeared — I remember seeing her walk down Main Street with her father the day they arrived — she was a dark, shrinking little thing with muddy cheeks and dull, stony eyes that refused to look at anybody. Seeing her from a little distance you would have thought her an underfed twelve-year-old; close up she looked nearer twice that age. Really she was then just nineteen.