Heart's Desire: The Story of a Contented Town, Certain Peculiar Citizens, and Two Fortunate Lovers; A NovelHough, Emerson
General
Heart's Desire: The Story of a Contented Town, Certain Peculiar Citizens, and Two Fortunate Lovers; A Novel
Hough, Emerson
City and town life -- Fiction; Western stories
"Shut up!" said Curly. "Now Tom Redmond, he took to this here Pinto
horse from havin' seen him jump the corral fence several times, and
start floatin' off across the country for a eight or ten mile sasshay
without no special encouragement. He hired three Castilian busters to
operate on Pinto, and he got so he could be rode occasional, but every
one allowed they never did see any horse just like him. He was the
most aggravatinest thing we ever did have on this range. He had a sort
of odd-lookin' white eye, but a heap of them _pintos_ has got glass
eyes, and so no one thought to examine his lookers very close, though
it was noticed early in the game that Pinto might be lookin' one way
and goin' the other, at the same time. He'd be goin' on a keen lope,
and then something or other might get on his mind, and he'd stop and
untangle hisself from all kinds of ridin'. Sometimes he'd jump and
snort like he was seein' ghosts. A feller on that horse could have
roped antelopes as easy as yearlin' calves, if he could just have told
which way Mr. Pinto was goin'; but he was a shore hard one to estermate.
"At last Tom, why, he suspected somethin' wasn't right with Pinto's
lamps. If you stuck out a bunch of hay at him, he couldn't bite it by
about five feet. When you led him down to water, you had to go
sideways; and if you wanted to get him in through the corral gate, you
had to push him in backward. We discovered right soon that he was born
with his parallax or something out of gear. His graduated scale of
seein' things was different from our'n. I don't reckon anybody ever
will know what all Pinto saw with them glass lamps of his, but all the
time we knowed that if we could ever onct get his lookin' outfit tuned
up proper, we had the whole country skinned in a horse race; for he
could shore run copious.
"That was why he had the whole Bar T outfit guessin' all the time. We
all wanted to bet on him, and we was all scared to. Sometimes we'd
make up a purse among us, and we'd go over to some social getherin' or
other, and win a thousand dollars. Old Pinto could run all day; he can
yet, for that matter. Didn't make no difference to him how often we
raced him; and natural, after we'd won one hatful of money with him,
we'd want to win another. That was where our judgment was weak.
"You never could tell whether Pinto was goin' to finish under the wire,
or out in the landscape. His eyes seemed to be sort of moverble, but
like enough they'd get sot when he went to runnin'. Then he'd run
whichever way he was lookin' at the time, or happened to think he was
lookin'; and dependin' additional on what he thought he saw. And law!
A whole board of supervisors and school commissioners couldn't have
looked that horse in the face, and guessed on their sacred honor
whether he was goin' to jump the fence to the left, or take to the high
sage on the outside of the track.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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