I am his favorite horse, out of dozens. Big as he is, I have carried him
eighty-one miles between nightfall and sunrise on the scout; and I am
good for fifty, day in and day out, and all the time. I am not large,
but I am built on a business basis. I have carried him thousands and
thousands of miles on scout duty for the army, and there’s not a gorge,
nor a pass, nor a valley, nor a fort, nor a trading post, nor a
buffalo-range in the whole sweep of the Rocky Mountains and the Great
Plains that we don’t know as well as we know the bugle-calls. He is
Chief of Scouts to the Army of the Frontier, and it makes us very
important. In such a position as I hold in the military service one
needs to be of good family and possess an education much above the common
to be worthy of the place. I am the best-educated horse outside of the
hippodrome, everybody says, and the best-mannered. It may be so, it is
not for me to say; modesty is the best policy, I think. Buffalo Bill
taught me the most of what I know, my mother taught me much, and I taught
myself the rest. Lay a row of moccasins before me—Pawnee, Sioux,
Shoshone, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and as many other tribes as you please—and
I can name the tribe every moccasin belongs to by the make of it. Name
it in horse-talk, and could do it in American if I had speech.
I know some of the Indian signs—the signs they make with their hands, and
by signal-fires at night and columns of smoke by day. Buffalo Bill
taught me how to drag wounded soldiers out of the line of fire with my
teeth; and I’ve done it, too; at least I’ve dragged _him_ out of the
battle when he was wounded. And not just once, but twice. Yes, I know a
lot of things. I remember forms, and gaits, and faces; and you can’t
disguise a person that’s done me a kindness so that I won’t know him
thereafter wherever I find him. I know the art of searching for a trail,
and I know the stale track from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by
myself, with Buffalo Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him—he will tell you
so. Many a time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at
dawn, “Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me.” Then he
goes to sleep. He knows he can trust me, because I have a reputation. A
scout horse that has a reputation does not play with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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