Hands of Man

I

DAN LEE was riding Dazzle when he brought the spotted mare for me.

Dan Lee was one of my oldest friends, though I had not seen him for fifteen years. When I was ten, he was the best horse breaker in the river county, and now that I was three times ten he had no betters. That’s a record for horsemen, and I was proud that he asked me to ride with him.

He came for me, at Matt the fisherman’s, when the autumn wind had whipped the looser leaves from the branches and rustled them over the meadow in scurrying clouds. It was the kind of wind that horses love, for it tangled their manes and made flags of their tails, and let them remember that once on a time no man had ridden them.

There was a mist along the Mississippi, one of those early fall mists that seep through the willows on the bank and make you know the harvesting is over and the burning of the leaves will soon begin. The hill behind Matt’s house was flooded in chill sunshine, while the river before it lay hid under its wispy, twisting fog, and the gurgle and splash of the water came from beneath it with a hollow, mocking tone. Between the river and the hill lay a stretch of colored woods, so faded by the frost of the night before that the shades were indistinguishable, and blended like old tapestries in a dim corridor.

Dan had turned up the collar of his tweed jacket. I followed his example, then mounted and let out my stirrup strap to its farthest hole. As soon as Dan got on Dazzle she reared to his and her satisfaction, and the ride was on.

‘ Been a long time since a girl’s rode that horse,’ said Dan. ‘Last one fell off.’

‘Really?’ I exclaimed.

‘Well, now,’ said Dan, ‘you ought to know I would n’t story to you.’

Perhaps I ought, but none the less doubts assailed me. I had not seen Dan for fifteen years, and I had not been riding for a very long time. The animal beneath me started off with a slightly rolling canter. She carried her head well up, and her hoofs rang on the frosty road. We rode through a shower of falling leaves at a good brisk pace. I was beginning to warm up, and to find the muscles in my knees, when a train whistled around the bend and the mare shot off like a rocket.

‘Pull on her mane!’ yelled Dan.

I caught a big handful and tugged. The mare went faster, but with less strain on the bit, and I knew that I had her. I did n’t care how fast or far she went. The wind caught my breath, and my heart beat time to the thud of her feet. Where Dan was I did not know. Somewhere behind. The world was mine, just then, a road for me to race on, and if the mare could go on forever, so could I.

What is it that comes over a human being when he finds a horse under him? Is it that he has added cubits to his stature and can look down upon the world? Or can it be the realization of power, his power over a creature stronger than himself, that flatters the vanity of men? Or is it simply the vibrant life of horses that comes to a rider like an electric charge, claiming his identity, and lending him in exchange the vigor that only four feet rightfully possess? Whatever the magic, it is strangely real, and caught me in its charm as soon as I put my foot into the stirrup.

Now I have had one wonder horse, and he has got his angel wings long since, but the memory and love of him are still fresh in my heart, so that I am critical of horseflesh and not prone to admire. Yet I had to admit that the spotted mare had a singular beauty. Few pintos are handsome. This one, however, not only was perfect in conformation, though oddly enough not highly bred, but had rich brown patches on a coat of milk-white satin, with a snowy mane and chestnut tail. Her slightly pointed ears were indices of a marked and true intelligence, and the small sure feet beat rhythmically in spirited action. Had it not been for loyalty to Pegasus, I might have loved her on the spot.

It suddenly occurred to me that I had not heard Dazzle’s hoof beats for a long time, so I pulled in the mare and turned back. Around a curve of the road I found my companions, Dazzle on her hind legs pawing the air, and Dan contentedly in the saddle smiling. My mount stopped, panted awhile, and fell to nosing the frostbitten goldenrod with an occasional glance of disapproval at Dazzle’s cavortings. Dan was working her closer and closer to the upturned roots of a tree. At each step, Dazzle crouched low on all fours, sprang to one side, then reared, pawing and snorting. Her eyes rolled. Foam dripped from her lips and the sweat ran streaming from her flanks. Watching them, it was not hard to understand how the Greeks thought a Thessalonian and his horse were one creature. If Dan was not part of Dazzle, then Dazzle was part of Dan.

‘And he loves it!’ I thought admiringly, and then, enviously, ‘Who would n’t?’

How old Dan was I did not know. He seemed exactly as he had when I was a child, except for the graying of his hair. Lean and tanned, with shrewd black eyes set close to a hawk nose and a quizzical smile on his thin lips, he looked the gypsy that he claimed to be.

Gradually Dazzle’s struggle grew less and less. She stood still at last, shaking and panting. Dan gave her time for a good breath and gently spurred her on to the tree roots that had frightened her. She stood over them at last, her head drooping, her spent legs spread far apart. The pinto edged closer to her. I put out my hand to pat her conquered head.

Dan caught my hand and held it back.

‘Don’t touch her head,’ he warned. ‘You ’ll set her off again. She’s a sp’ilt horse and won’t let no one pat her.'

‘ Did n’t she ever see this tree root before?’ I asked.

‘Sure she has,’ said Dan. ‘It ain’t all fright. It’s temper. However, if she can be broke, I ’ll break her.’

‘And meantime?’

‘Meantime I’ll ride ’er!’ he said with a grin that meant plainer than words that he hoped it would be a long time.

‘I don’t see why anyone should fall off this horse,’ I said. ‘How old was the girl who spilled?’

‘Dunno,’ said Dan. ‘I did n’t have time to look at her teeth.’ And before I could answer, he spurred Dazzle up a side road. ‘I got to look for a mare who broke pasture up this way. ’T won’t take us more’n a month. If the moon comes up next week maybe we’ll meet a hant I know back in these woods a piece.’

I followed him along a dirt road to a gate that bore the legend: ‘No admittance.’ Dan dismounted, pried open the rusty latch, and beckoned me after him.

‘What does the sign mean?’ I asked, for, having lived many years in a city, I have a wholesome respect for signs.

‘Dunno,’ said Dan, with his straightest face. ‘I never went to school, so I can’t read. What does the sign mean? ’

We trotted over a weed-grown road that led us through five sagging gates in dilapidated fences that shut in empty, desolate fields, and came at last to a group of cabins fallen to ruin. The oaks that stood over them kept them perpetually in the shade, and a spring, hidden somewhere about, gurgled faintly in the shadow. It was an eerie place.

‘Right here,’ said Dan solemnly, ‘I met that hant. Maybe to-night, or to-morrow night if we ain’t found that mare, we’ll see him. You believe in hants? Well, you better believe in this one, ’cause, boy! he sure knows what’s going on in your mind.’

He looked so terribly in earnest that I did n’t know what to answer, so I pulled out my cigarette case and offered him a smoke. But his mind was on the hant, and whether he smoked or not, in private, he declined my offer.

As we rode past the decrepit barn, a family of skunks took shelter under its fallen door. Across the bat-infested loft was painted in faded letters: —

The last words humanity had left on its surrender! Ozymandias the Mighty did not have more to say.

II

From this abandoned farm we turned to the right and rode single file through the uncleared woods. Brambles caught our hats and legs. Once a swinging vine entangled my mare’s legs, and I hallooed for help. There was no sound but the crackling of the dry brush and the softer patter of the falling leaves. A hawk wheeled over us, pivoted, and soared away. I found myself patting the pinto’s neck and talking to her, about Bellows’s pictures and Moussorgsky’s rhythms, and all the secret things one talks of to a horse. An unutterable longing welled up within me. It was through these woods that Pegasus and I had spent long afternoons together, when he was my only comrade and both of us were young. Why did I have to grow up, or Pegasus to die? What right had I to live on and make love to another horse?

‘The world moves on, old friend, and no matter if some day I should love another, I ’ll never forget you, now that you are dead and I have learned what I have learned about the world.’

A little noise, like a whispered nicker, came from the thicket at my side, and I did not doubt my little brother had heard and answered me.

Dazzle began to trot, and we came out of the wood on to a cleared knoll. A few mules grazed idly on the summit. Dan rode into their midst, and stood in his stirrups to look about him. The mules scattered, but came sidling back, their big ears waggling idiotically, and their silly shaved tails flapping their sides. The spotted mare’s ears went back, and she kicked at the nearest. Dazzle began to cavort, but Dan held her down and cuffed one curious brute on the nose to send him scampering.

‘You know,’ said Dan, ‘ain’t nobody ever gone to Hell for ’busin’ a mule.’

I readily agreed, and looked not for the lost mare, but at the panorama thus suddenly revealed. The highway ran immediately below the hill we stood upon, and beyond that lay the patchwork of fields and barns and farmhouses, all different sizes and as many colors. Away to the northeast, the river finished the picture with a flash as radiant as a blue jay’s wing.

‘She might a gone in here,’ Dan said at last, leading off where the oaks grew closer together and taller.

We went on in silence. The ground was covered with a carpet of leaves, gone, as we all shall go, back to the earth who sent them out and called them back as she does men and horses. The trees were browner here, and indeed, riding away from the river, the land looked paler and wanting in energy. We started downhill, facing the wood. The slope became quickly steeper, and, pointing a way round for me, Dan brought Dazzle down the rocky slant with all her feet together, almost sitting. She protested vigorously, but soon forgot her own indignity when two tremendous owls flapped over us with threatening hoots. We could ride no farther. The bank dropped away to a stream twelve feet below, yet Dan suspected his mare had got through a gap in the fence and asked if I wished to pursue her on foot. We tied our mounts, slipped through the barbed wire, and slid down the crumbly bank to a dry spot in the stream bed.

It was a shallow stream. Around the bend, the bank shot upward a good fifty feet. The water ran scarcely two feet deep, and was chalky blue, for the rocks in the perpendicular hillside were a soft blue stone that contrasted beautifully with the brown of the soil and the dull red trees.

‘No, sir,’ said Dan, ‘she ain’t been down here.’

‘What would she come here for?'

‘Water, maybe.’

I could see he was worried.

‘What kind of horse is she, Dan?’

‘She’s a thoroughbred,’ he said, and went downstream looking for hoof-prints.

But there were no prints of any kind in the dry sand. While Dan searched, I picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. From behind me a stone sprang through the air and skimmed the water ten times to my one. Dan was chuckling at my throws. I copied his method, and soon we had assembled a whole pile of rocks and had a competition under full swing. From the way we went at it, you would have thought the only serious business in the world was ours. First I threw, and then he threw, and his stone would skip over mine or knock it under. Up the creek went the stones, frightening the water snakes from their last sun bath of the season.

‘This sure would make a good place for a camp,’ said Dan.

‘Wouldn’t it!’ I agreed. ‘Think of having a tent here, and a fire, and never having to go back to a city, or shops — ’

‘Just horses,’ said Dan.

‘They make better friends than most people.’

Dan nodded, and I suddenly realized that I had never seen him so long off a horse before.

‘A thoroughbred is a runner, is n’t it?’ said I, trying to sound wise.

‘This one of mine’s more’n that,’ Dan told me. ‘She’s gallant and she’s got manners. I never seen her lose her head. She’s a lady.’

‘What about the girl who fell off the pinto?’

‘Oh, her!’ said Dan. ‘If I had my way, I’d take her out to the woods and leave her to the wolves.’

‘Where are there any wolves?’ I demanded.

Dan chuckled. ‘There’s always one round my front door!’ said he. ‘Come on, we better get goin’.’

We sent a last stone a-skipping up the stream, and clambered up the bank to our waiting horses. Again in the saddles, we skirted the foot of the hill and pushed on through a thick growth of fading sumach and hanging grapevines. The sun was warmer in the open, and the pinto shook her head and clicked her shoes as we came out on a cleared slope that invited a canter.

What fun it must be to have been born a horse! To kick four heels in a meadow and toss a mane in the wind!

‘The animals have it all over us, lucky brutes,’ I thought. ‘They have n’t even souls to bother over. Their life is a free gift, and ours is a duty; and yet we think ourselves the masters of creation! Pompous asses!’ I exclaimed, spurring on the pinto. ‘Just because we’ve got minds to make ourselves miserable with!’

And indeed, the same sky was over the pinto and me, and the same earth under our feet. We breathed the same air, and our pulses beat with the same joy of running in the wind.

‘Brothers!’ I said, and again, just behind me, I thought I heard the ghostlike whicker that I knew.

Up another hilltop, with Buffalo Knob in the distance dark red against the sky, and the river framing the picture with its ever-moving variety, but never changing its intention of reaching a far-away sea — just as determined on getting there, whether it knew it or not, as I was on getting to Heaven, whether I knew it or not.

‘It is n’t fair!’ I said, for the river went on quite happily, and without apparent strivings. ‘There’s nothing we do in our way that they don’t do better in theirs, and where will the music and the bridges be when the sun goes out — as it will some day — and dumps us, man and animal alike, into the dark? Men always struggling, and trying, and failing, and working it over again to a success that may last and may not; and animals (except when we capture them) and rivers (except when we interfere with them) living a life that’s graceful and free. We’re not so much, we men.’

III

The pinto shook her beautiful white mane, and I felt the life of her vibrate when she suddenly stopped and pointed her ears down the hill. There we saw a group of horses, kicking and fighting on the edge of a ravine. They made a splendid picture. One of them squealed and lined out across the slope, its legs swinging rhythmically, unhampered by saddle girth. Dan saw the crowd, and with a shout he plunged down the hillside like thunder, scattering them all but one.

That one stood, strangely enough, like a statue. Her long legs, stretched uncomfortably far apart, spanned the ravine. She looked a bag of bones. The mud on her sides outlined a gaunt array of ribs. I wondered if she had starved for a month, and again I wondered how she could hold her position, and why she did not follow the herd. Her head was drooping from weariness, but every now and again she would throw it erect, and the muscles in her neck bulged with the effort to keep it there. Pitiful, but brave; whatever her extremity might be, her patience was heroic and her steadfastness superb.

Dan leaped from Dazzle, and I knew this was the thoroughbred he sought. I hurried over to them to take Dazzle’s bridle while he approached the mare. Her head fell as he drew near, and she threw it up with an effort that must have hurt, but her eyes glowed red with wariness and exhaustion. Dan whistled, then dropped into the ravine. The other horses came crowding back, so that I was too busy scaring them away to notice what Dan was doing.

‘Leave go the horses, will you,’ he called, ‘and come over here!’

I did what he asked.

‘There! Now twist the thoroughbred’s ear and hold it tight — just a minute —'

I seized her ear as her head sank, and she tried to bite, but could not find the energy. Dan crawled out of the ravine on all fours with a colt in his arms.

Of all the colts I ever saw, this was the most forlorn! Its legs were as floppy as its droopy ears, and its coat was covered with twigs and mud. Dan began talking to it before he was well out of the ravine.

‘Come on, colty, you’re all right. You get some dinner and it won’t seem such a crool ol’ world.’

The thoroughbred had surrendered at last, and stood head down under my restraining hand, until she saw Dan with her baby, when the little spirit left in her stiffened her legs for the bound she gave after him. Down she fell in a heap, her head and her hoofs in a miserable tangle. I never thought she’d get up again. Dan went a little farther with the colt’s legs sticking out under his arms. It was too much for the mare. She had fought off the curious herd and she was not going to lose her baby now he was out of the ravine. She struggled to her feet, plunged her length, and fell again, to lie heaving on her side. But she was now in a sheltered place. Dan laid the colt down by her, and we gave them time to rest up and make friends.

Meantime, Dan took off the pinto’s saddle and bridle and laid them a good distance away, on the far side of the ravine. Dazzle was out of sight. I could n’t imagine what Dan meant by not tying up the pinto so that we could catch Dazzle and have a way of getting home. Yet I ought to have known that where horses are concerned Dan is always right. The spotted mare, though she could not salute, understood the command better than I, for she consciously mounted guard over her master’s equipment and began a fight with the herd that she never relinquished until Dan released her from duty and put the saddle once more on her back. Her position commanded the only crossing to our side, and we left her to defend it alone while we worked over the colt.

And it was work!

The colt was shivering. Dan took off his jacket, stuck the baby’s forelegs into the sleeves, and gave it into my keeping while he lifted and cajoled the mother to stand on her feet. She was gallant, as he had said, and she stood on her feet — until her knees gave way and he had to help her up again. To make matters worse, the colt had lain so long in the ravine that its craving for food was stunned by shock, and open its mouth it would not. First, I would hold up the colt to nurse while Dan supported the mare, and suddenly the baby would plunge to its knees. Then I’d get the baby steadied, and just as it would try to suck, the mother would tremble and fall, knocking the colt out of my grasp. And it was all legs! Nothing but legs, except for a fluffy tail that arched absurdly.

‘Here,’ said Dan. ‘We ain’t gettin’ nowhere. If this colty don’t eat right quick, he never will.’

He let the thoroughbred lie down, took a bridle rein for a nose twitch, gave it to me to twist, and, seizing the colt by the tail, opened its mouth and tried to get the milk in.

But the colt did not know how to swallow!

I never felt so baffled. Dan was nonplused. The thoroughbred looked at me out of staring, bewildered eyes, even more helpless than we. In the midst of the quandary, for Dan had given over trying for the moment and was thinking hard, I recollected my thoughts of an hour ago, when animals had seemed superior to man in their strength and their cunning.

‘Look here,’ said Dan, ‘all I need is another hand! If I could work its throat till it gets the idear of swallowin’ —'

‘All right,’ said I, ‘I’ll shift the twitch to my left hand and hold its tail with my right.’

So we did. Dan propped the colt’s belly with his knee, and we began to succeed. Except for the fact that every now and then the thoroughbred would fall down, usually on top of the colt, nearly crushing him, we made a little headway — very little. Luckily it was not summer and we did not have sunstroke to contend with. The keen autumn wind, broken as it was by the limestone outcrop at the top of the hill, was cold on us, and the colt’s thin little middle needed more warmth than the tweed jacket could put into it. We kept on, and on, and on. Every time the mare would fall down, we looked at each other in dismay and Dan would pick her up again, pat her, rub her, talk to her, anything and everything to put heart into her, splendid creature that she was. But there was no water near, and without a drink even I knew she could not stand the strain much longer. Then all at once the colt took a deep breath and nursed hard. Dan let him go, and he took three steps before he tumbled.

‘He’ll do,’ said Dan. ‘Let’s get her in.’

It was slow progress getting the colt and the thoroughbred over the hill and into a small corral on the other side of it. We went on an easy slant, about seven steps at a time. Even at that rate, I doubted if the mare would make it. Yet she did. Dan carried the colt in his arms sometimes, and sometimes braced its wobbly hind legs by the tail. A useful handle! Indeed, I don’t know what we should have done without it.

As we rounded the slope, Dan yelled back to the pinto, ‘Keep them horses off my saddle!’

The spotted mare pawed, and whickered after us. She never left her post for a minute, and the last we could see of her she was standing her ground.

‘Won’t she get hurt? ’ I asked.

Dan shook his head.

‘She’s shod and they ain’t. ’T won’t be long till they find out.’

I never saw a piece of ground that stretched out as endlessly as that one across the hill. When the mare went well we let the baby walk behind, and when the baby had nursed again we let it hop along in front to keep up its mother’s courage. And all the while our feet dragged over the way I was wondering if we should all get there alive. Angels of darkness and light hovered above us.

‘Pegasus,’ I said, in my most secret mode of conversation, ‘you’ve lived and you’ve died. What do you think about it all? Tell me! You’re still my horse. Whether I see you in clouds above the hilltops or feel you in the wind over the river, you are part of all creation just as I am, and nothing that was born can pass into oblivion. Dew turns to clouds and falls again as rain. Pegasus, tell me! Why do we struggle so for life?’

The colt, hampered by Dan’s coat but now thoroughly warmed, tripped and got one leg out of the sleeve. The rest fell off, and he capered as he felt the sun on his little back.

‘He’s O. K.,’ said Dan proudly.

‘Come on, colty, show your ma how good you feel.’

He led the colt to her as she lay heaving on the ground. The sight of him made her lift her head, and a little gleam of light shone in her dimmed eyes. He touched his nose to hers, and she smelled of him and lay back. But I think from that time we both knew she’d make it.

‘It ain’t much farther, ol’ girl,’ Dan coaxed. ‘Come on and get a drink. If the little fella can make it, you sure can.’

He pulled her up again, and commenced the last lap of the journey.

IV

I’ll never forget the sigh the thoroughbred gave when she fell on to the pile of straw in the corral and knew she had n’t to get up again. She lay stretched out, a scarecrow thing to look at, with her lips drawn back from her teeth. Dan brought her a bucket of water, and she sucked it in without getting up. The gratitude in her eyes was the biggest thing about her then. She had another drink, and I found a handful of hay in the crib, but she was too tired to chew, and better off without. The colt, meanwhile, had got very frisky, and was sniffing at everything around that was not too far off from his mother.

There we left them when we went back for our mounts. I remember how dark the mare looked in the pale sunshine, lying on the heap of yellowish straw, with the scarlet maples overhead. One little squirrel sat on the rail of the fence and scolded us all. The colt crouched close to its mother at this extraordinary noise.

‘Whew!’ said Dan, mopping his face. ‘I sure did n’t know she was goin’ to find her a colt to-day.’

We found the pinto still on duty. While Dan saddled her and rode off to catch Dazzle, I climbed to the top of the hill and watched him cut Dazzle out of the herd and chase her over the ravine crossing.

‘Will they be all right alone?’ I asked, when we were once more riding.

‘Sure,’ said Dan, ‘they don’t need us no more. Let’s go home through the prairie.’

The ‘prairie’ was, I suppose, one of the few strips of ground in Missouri that had never known cultivation. It lay between the corn land of the flood plain and the railroad track that shut it in, a tract of land covered with tall stiff grass, strangely green even at this time of year, that grew as high as our stirrups and whistled as we passed.

‘This-here buffalo grass makes good feed if it’s stacked green,’ said Dan.

We rode on without speaking through the waves of the green prairie sea, where the buffalo had feasted when America was young, before horses or a printed book had alighted on its shores.

‘The world is very old, Dan Lee,’ I said. ‘Does n’t it make you feel insignificant and useless to think about it all?’

‘Not me,’ said Dan, ‘’cause I don’t think.’

‘How do you keep from it?’ I asked.

For answer, he dropped the bridle and held out his hands.

‘Use ’em,’ he said, ‘and you won’t get time to think.’

I looked at his hands, calloused and sunburned and strong, hands that had controlled Dazzle’s rebellion and saved the life of a colt. It was hands like these that had turned the prairies into cities and changed the force of rivers into light.

' Hands! ’ I exclaimed, as if I had not had a pair all my life.

The low sun showered the hills about us with the faint mellow tinge of Burgundy wine, a kindly benediction to keep them through the dark.

‘ Hands, ’ I said again, as if the thought that gripped me had five fingers on it. ‘What would the mare and the colt have done without ours?’

‘Died,’ said Dan, with his quizzical smile. ‘Animals always die when they get in bad. It sure takes a man to get out of trouble.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Ride hard. I’ve got to get back to work.’

And the pinto, fresh from her rest in the pasture, struck out with her rolling canter into the road and down the hard gravel to Matt’s. It was a joyous ride, and with real sadness I kissed her forehead and bid her good-bye.

‘So long,’ said Dan. ‘You make a right good hand.’

I said farewell, and stood beside Matt’s gate, turning over in my mind what was perhaps the greatest compliment I ever had in my life.

‘A right good hand!’

‘What if horses and rocks had hands?’ I suddenly thought.

And it seemed to me that everything around, hills and trees and the river, was rushing toward me, through me, that I might turn its substance, of which I too was made, into the dreams it could not fulfill.

‘Hands!’ I whispered. ‘The will’s highway, the right to work! Go play, you other things! I am a man.’

The sun dropped down behind the hill, and a streak of red light stained the channel. Afar down, on both sides of the bank, I could see the lights of the bobbing buoys glitter and shine. An owl hooted from the deeper wood, and the hill looked nearer the river as the twilight gathered them in. Slowly the colors faded, till the trees were blotted out and the river and the hill were one gray mass with a glimmer on water and a glimmer on rock, indistinguishable from the faint stars in the sky.

‘And I alone have hands,’ I said to the wind in the dark. ‘Now I know what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God.’

And out of the wind there answered the ghost-like little whicker that I knew.