There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother’s chair, getting her head between her mother’s work and the light, and begs for pictures.
She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures.
It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with her mother’s mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little girl’s head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made somehow, and before it is finished Polly’s heart will be so full of sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same subject.
It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful, considering the extent of Polly’s patronage, that her artist’s work does not better itself.
It is always a picture of a young person on horseback,—a young person about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grown-up looking. And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of those “crazy-bugs” (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile, because Polly cannot make profiles, except horses’ profiles; her young persons always look straight out of the picture as they ride along, and the effect, at full speed, on a horse with his legs widely extended from his body, is extremely gay and nonchalant.
With the picture in her hand, the little girl will go away by herself and proceed to “dream and to dote.”
She lives in a horsey country. Horses in troops or “bands” go past by the trails, on the one side of the river or the other. Sometimes they ford where the water is breast-high over the bar. It is wild and delicious to hear the mares whinnying to their foals in midstream, and the echo of their voices, with the rushing of the loud water pent among the hills.
Often the riders who are in charge of the band encamp for the night on the upper bend of the river, and the red spark of their camp-fire glows brightly about the time the little girl must be going to bed; for it is in spring or fall the bands of horses go up into the hills or down into the valleys, or off, one does not know where,—to a “round up,” perhaps, where each stockman counts his own, and puts his brand on the young colts. Over the hills, where Polly and her big brother go wild-flower hunting, horses wander loose and look down from the summits, mere specks, like black mice, against the sky; they are plainly to be seen from miles away, for there is not a tree anywhere upon these hills. Sometimes a single horse, the chieftain of a troop, will stand alone on a hilltop and take a look all the wide country round, and call, in his splendid voice like “sounding brass,” to the mares and colts that have scattered in search of alkali mud to lick, or just to show, perhaps, that they are able to get on without his lordship. He will call, and if his troop do not answer, he will condescend to go a little way to meet them, halting and inquiring with short whinnies what they are about. Sometimes, in spite of discipline, they will compel him to go all the way to meet them; for even a horse soon tires of dignity on a hilltop all alone, with no one to see how it becomes him.
Polly likes to meet stray horses on her walks, close enough to see their colors and tell which are the pretty ones, the ones she calls hers. They stare at her from under breezy forelocks, and no doubt think themselves much finer creatures than little girls who have only two feet to go upon. And the little girl thinks so, too,—or so it would seem; for every evening after sunset when she runs about the house bareheaded she plays she is a horse herself. And not satisfied with being a horse, she plays she is a rider, too. Such a complex ideal as that surely never came into the brain of a “cayuse,” for all his big eyes and his tangle of hair which Polly thinks so magnificent.
The head and the feet of Polly and her tossing locks are pure horse; that is evident at a glance as she prances past the window. But the clinched, controlling hands are the hands of the rider,—a thrilling combination on a western summer evening, when the brassy sunset in the gate of the cañon is like a trumpet-note, and the cold, pink light on the hills is as keen as a bugle-call, and the very spirit of “boots and saddles” is in the wind that gustily blows up from the plains, turning all the poplars white, and searching the quiet house from room to room for any laggard stay-indoors.
Within a mile of the house, in the cañon which Polly calls home, there is a horse ranch in a lovely valley opening toward the river. All around it are these treeless hills that look so barren and feed so many wild lives. The horses have a beautiful range, from the sheltered valley up the gulches to the summits of the hills and down again to the river to drink. The men live in a long, low cabin, attached to a corral much bigger than the cabin, and have an extremely horsey time of it.
I shouldn’t be surprised if it were among Polly’s dreams to be one of a picked company of little-girl riders, in charge of a band of long-tailed ponies, just the right size for little girls to manage; to follow the ponies over the hills all day, and at evening to fetch water from the river and cook their own little-girl suppers in the dingy cabin by the corral; to have envious visits from other little girls, and occasionally to go home and tell mother all about it.
Now, in this country of real horses there were not many play-horses, and these few not of the first quality. Hobby-horses in the shops of the town were most trivial in size, meant only for riders of a very tender age. Some of them were merely heads of horses, fastened to a seat upon rockers, with a shelf in front to keep the inexperienced rider in his place.
There were people in the town, no doubt, who had noble rocking-horses for their little six-year-olds, but they must have sent for them on purpose; the storekeepers did not “handle” this variety.
So Polly’s papa, assisted by John Brown, the children’s most delightful companion and slave and story-teller, concluded to build a hobby-horse that would outdo the hobby-horse of commerce. (Brown was a modest, tender-hearted man, who had been a sailor off the coast of Norway, among the islands and fiords, a miner where the Indians were “bad,” a cowboy, a ranchman; and he was now irrigating the garden and driving the team in the cañon.)
Children like best the things they invent and make themselves, and plenty of grown people are children in this respect; they like their own vain imaginings better than some of the world’s realities.
But Polly’s rocking-horse was no “vain thing,” although her father and John did have their own fun out of it before she had even heard of it.
His head wasn’t “made of pease-straw,” nor his tail “of hay,” but in his own way he was quite as successful a combination.
His eyes were two of Brother’s marbles. They were not mates, which was a pity, as they were set somewhat closely together so you couldn’t help seeing them both at once; but as one of them soon dropped out it didn’t so much matter. His mane was a strip of long leather fringe. His tail was made up of precious contributions extorted from the real tails of Billy and Blue Pete and the team-horses, and twined most lovingly together by John, the friend of all the parties to the transfer.
The saddle was a McClellan tree, which is the framework of a kind of man’s saddle; a wooden spike, fixed to the left side of it and covered with leather, made a horn, and the saddle-blanket was a Turkish towel.
It was rainy weather, and the cañon days were short, when this unique creation of love and friendship—which are things more precious, it is to be hoped, even than horseflesh—took its place among Polly’s idols, and was at once clothed on with all her dreams of life in action.
When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well; they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.
She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to their favorite “hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad tempers into smiles and sunshine.
She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat. She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with draughts in a corner of the piazza.
Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range, the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,—not mamma’s picture, but the one in the child’s heart,—she takes to the saddle again, and the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.
Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the child-woman binds about her brows when she walks—like Troy’s proud dames whose garments sweep the ground—in the skirt of her mother’s “cast-off gown”?
It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with straining after the fleeting vision.
It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”
If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long before them!