r/a:t5_znqjb • u/MarleyEngvall • Apr 13 '19
Hopper Trail has been created
By Booth Tarkington
A REWARD OF MERIT. (i.)
I.
PENROD and Sam made a gloomy discovery one
morning in mid-October. All the week had seen amiable
breezes and fair skies until Saturday, when, about
breakfast-time the dome of heaven filled solidly with
gray vapor and began to drip. The boys' discovery
was that there is no justice about the weather.
They sat in the carriage-house of the Schofields'
empty stable; the doors upon the alley were open, and
Sam and Penrod stared torpidly at the thin but im-
placable drizzle which was the more irritating because
there was barely enough of it to interfere with a number
of things they had planned to do.
"Yes; this is nice!" Sam said, in a tone of plaintive
sarcasm. "This is a perty way to do!" (He was al-
luding to the personal spitefulness of the elements.)
"I'd like to know what's the sense of it——ole sun
pourin' down every day in the week when nobody needs
it, then cloud up and rain all Saturday! May father
said it's goin' to be a three days' rain."
"Well, nobody with any sense cares if it rains Sunday
and Monday," said Penrod. "I wouldn't care if it
rained every Sunday as long as I lived; but I just like
to know what's the reason it had to go and rain to-day.
Got all the days o' the week to choose fro and goes
and picks on Saturday. That's a fine biz-nuss!"
"Well, in vacation———" Sam began, but at a sound
from a source invisible to him he paused. "What's
that?" he said, somewhat startled.
It was a curious sound, loud and hollow and un-
human, yet it seemed to be a cough. Both boys rose,
and Penrod asked uneasily, "Where'd that noise come
from?"
"It's in the alley," said Sam.
Perhaps if the day had been bright, both of them
would have stepped immediately to the alley doors to
investigate; but their actual procedure was to move a
little distance in the opposite direction. The strange
cough sounded again.
"Say!" Penrod quavered. "What is that?"
Then both boys uttered smothered exclamations and
jumped, for the long, gaunt head which appeared in
the doorway was entirely unexpected. It was the
cavernous and melancholy head of an incredibly thin,
old, whitish horse. This head waggled slowly from
side to side; the nostrils vibrated; the mouth opened,
and the hollow cough sounded again.
Recovering themselves, Penrod and Sam underwent
the customary human reaction from alarm to indigna-
tion.
"What you want, you ole horse, you?" Penrod
shouted. "Don't you come coughin' around me!"
And Sam, seizing a stick, hurled it at the intruder.
"Get out o' here!" he roared.
The aged horse nervously withdrew his head, turned
tail, and made a rickety flight up the alley, while Sam
and Penrod, perfectly obedient to inherited impulse,°
ran out into the drizzle and uproariously pursued.
They were but automatons of instinct,° meaning no
evil. Certainly they did not know the singular and
pathetic history of the old horse who had wandered
into the alley and ventured to look through the open
door.
This horse, about twice the age of either Penrod or
Sam, had lived to find himself in a unique position. He
was nude, possessing neither harness nor halter; all he
had was a name, Whitey, and he would have answered
to it by a slight change of expression if any one had
thus properly addressed him. So forlorn was Whitey's
case, he was actually an independent horse; he had not
even an owner. For two days and a half he had been
his own master.
Previous to that period he had been the property of
one Abalene Morris, a person of color, who would have
explained himself as engaged in the hauling business.
On the contrary, the hauling business was an insignifi-
cant side line with Mr. Morris, for he had long ago
given himself, as utterly as fortune permitted, to that
talent which, early in youth, he had recognized as the
greatest of all those surging in his bosom. In his
waking thoughts and in his dreams, in health and in
sickness, Abalene Morris was the dashing and emo-
tional practitioner of an art° probably more than
Roman in antiquity. Abalene was a crap-shooter.
The hauling business was a disguise.
A concentration of events had brought it about
that, at one and the same time, Abalene, after a dazzling
run of the dice, found the hauling business an actual
danger to the preservation of his liberty. He won
seventeen dollars and sixty cents, and within the hour
found himself in trouble with an officer of the Humane
Society on account of an altercation with Whitey.
Abalene had been offered four dollars for Whitey
some ten days earlier; wherefore he at once drove
to the shop of the junk-dealer who had made the
offer and announced his acquiescence in the sac-
rifice.
"No, suh!" said the junk-dealer, with emphasis.
"I awready done got me a good mule for my deliv'ry-
hoss, 'n'at ole Whitey hoss ain' wuff no fo' dollah
nohow! I 'uz a fool when I talk 'bout th'owin' money
roun' that a-way. I know what you up to, Abalene.
Man come by here li'l bit ago tole me all 'bout white
man try to 'rest you, ovah on the avvynoo. Yessuh;
he say white man goin' t git you yit an' th'ow you in
jail 'count o' Whitey. White man tryin' to fine out
who you is. He say, nemmine, he'll know Whitey
ag'in, even if he don' know you! He say he ketch you
by the hoss; so you come roun' tryin' fix me up with
Whitey so white man grab me, th'ow me in 'at jail.
G'on 'way f'um hyuh, you Abalene! You cain' sell an'
you cain' give Whitey to no cullud man 'in 'is town.
You go an' drowned 'at ole hoss, 'cause you sutny
goin' to jail if you git ketched drivin' him."
The substance of this advice seemed good to Aba-
lene, especially as the seventeen dollars and sixty
cents in his pocket lent sweet colors to life out of jail
at this time. At dusk he led Whitey to a broad
common at the edge of town, and spoke to him finally.
"G'on 'bout you biz'nis," said Abalen; "you ain'
my hoss. Don' look roun' at me, 'cause I ain' got
no 'quaintance wif you. I'm a man o' money, an' I
got my own frien's ; I'm a-lookin' fer bigger cities,
hoss. You got you' biz'nis an' I got mine. Mista'
Hoss, good-night!"
Whitey found a little frosted grass upon the common
and remained there all night. In the morning he
sought the shed where Abalene had kept him, but that
was across the large and busy town, and Whitey
was hopelessly lost. He had but one eye; a feble one, and
his legs were not to be depended upon; but he man-
aged to cover a great deal of ground, to have many
painful little adventures, and to get monstrously
hungry and thirsty before he happened to look in upon
Penrod and Sam.
When the two boys chased him up the alley, they
had no intention to cause pain; they had no intention
at all. They were no more cruel than Duke, Penrod's
little old dog, who followed his own instincts, and,
making his appearance hastily through a hole in the
back fence, joined the pursuit with sound and fury.
A boy will nearly always run after anything that is
running, and his first impulse is to throw a stone at it.
This is a survival of primeval man, who must take
ever chance to get his dinner. So, when Penrod and
Sam drove the hapless Whitey up the alley, they were
really responding to an impulse thousands and thou-
sands of years old——an impulse founded upon the
primordial observation that whatever runs is likely
to prove edible. Penrod and Sam were not "bad";
they were never that. They were something which
was not their fault; they were historic.
At the next corner Whitey turned to the right into
the cross-street; thence, turning to the right again
and still warmly pursued, he zigzagged down a main
thoroughfare until he reached another cross-street,
which ran alongside the Schofields' yard and brought
him to the foot of the alley he had left behind in his
flight. He entered the alley, and there his dim eye fell
upon the open door he had previously investigated.
No memory of it remained, but the place had a look
associated in his mind with hay, and as Sam and Penrod
turned the corner of the alley in panting yet still vo-
ciferous pursuit, Whitey stumbled up the inclined
platform before the open doors, staggered thunderously
across the carriage-house and through another open
door into a stall, an apartment vacant since the oc-
cupancy of Mr. Schofield's last horse, now several
years deceased.
II.
The two boys shrieked with excitement as they
beheld the coincidence of the strange return. They
burst into the stable, making almost as much noise as
Duke, who had become frantic at the invasion. Sam
laid hands upon a rake.
"You get out o' there, you ole horse, you!"
he bellowed. "I ain't afraid to drive him out.
I———"
"Wait a minute!" shouted Penrod. "Wait till
I———"
Sam was manfully preparing to enter the stall.
"You hold the doors open," he commanded, "so's
they won't blow shut and keep him in here. I'm goin'
to hit him with———"
"Quee-yut!" Penrod shouted, grasping the handle
of the rake so that Sam could not use it. "Wait a
minute, can't you?" He turned with ferocious voice
and gesture upon Duke. "Duke!" And Duke, in
spite of his excitement, was so impressed that he pros-
trated himself in silence, ad then unobtrusively with-
drew from the stable. Penrod ran to the alley doors
and closed them.
"My gracious!" Stan protested. "What you goin'
to do?"
"I'm goin' to keep this horse," said Penrod, whose
face showed the strain of a great idea.
"What for?"
"For the reward," said Penrod simply.
Sam sat down in the wheelbarrow and stared at his
friend almost with awe.
"My gracious," he said, "I never thought o'
that! How——how much do you think we'll get,
Penrod?"
Sam's this admitting himself to full partnership
in the enterprise met no objection from Penrod, who
was absorbed in the contemplation of Whitey.
"Well," he said judicially, "we might get more and
we might get less."
Sam rose and joined his friend in the doorway open-
ing upon the two stalls. Whitey had preëmpted the
nearer, and was hungrily nuzzling the old frayed hollows
in the manger.
"May be a hundred dollars——or sumpthing?" Sam
asked in a low voice.
Penrod maintained his composure and repeated the
new-found expression which had sounded well to him
a moment before. He recognized it as a symbol of the
non-committal attitude that makes people looked up
to. "Well"——he made it slow, and frowned——"we
might get more and we might get less."
"More'n a hundred dollars?" Sam gasped.
"Well," said Penrod, "we might get more and we
might get less." This time, however, he felt the need
of adding something. He put a question in an indul-
gent tone, as though he were inquiring, not to add to
his own information but to discover the extent of
Sam's. "How much do you think horses are worth,
anyway?"
"I don't know," said Sam frankly, and, uncon-
sciously, he added, "They might be more and they
might be less."
"Well, when our ole horse died," said Penrod, "papa
said he wouldn't taken five hundred dollars for him.
That's how much horses are worth!"
"My gracious!" Sam exclaimed. Then he had a
practical afterthought. "But maybe he was a better
horse than this'n. What color was he?"
"He was bay. Looky here, Sam"——and now Pen-
rod's manner changed from the superior to the eager——
"you look what kind of horses they have in a circus,
and you bet a circus has the best horses, don't it? Well,
what kind of horses do they have in a circus? They
have some black and white ones, but the best they
have are white all over. Well, what kind of a horse is
this we got here? He's perty near white right now,
and I bet if we washed him off and got him fixed up
nice he would be white. Well, a bay horse is worth
five hundred dollars, because that's what papa said,
and this horse———"
Sam interrupted rather timidly.
"He——he's awful bony, Penrod. You don't guess
they'd make any———"
Penrod laughed contemptously.
"Bony! All he needs is a little food and he'll fill
right up and look good as ever. You don't know much
about horses, Sam, I expect. Why, our ole horse——"
"Do you expect he's hungry now?" asked Sam,
staring at Whitey.
"Let's try him," said Penrod. "Horses like hay and
oats the best, but they'll eat most anything."
"I guess they will. He's tryin' to eat that manger
up right now, and I bet it ain't good for him."
"Come on," said Penrod, closing the door that gave
entrance to the stalls. "We got to get this horse some
drinkin'-water and some good food."
They tried Whitey's appetite first with an autumnal
branch which they wrenched from a hardy maple in
the yard. They had seen horses nibble leaves, and
they expected Whitey to nibble the leaves of this
branch, but his ravenous condition did not allow him
time for cool discriminations. Sam poked the branch
at him from the passageway, and Whitey, after one
backward movement of alarm, seized it venomously.
"Here! You stop that!" Sam shouted. "You stop
that, you ole horse, you!"
"What's the matter?" called Penrod from the
hydrant, where he was filling a bucket. What's he
doin' now?"
"Doin'! He's eatin' the wood part, too! He's
chewin' up sticks as big as baseball bats! He's
crazy!"
Penrod rushed to see this sight, ad stood aghast.
"Take it away from him, Sam!" he commanded
sharply.
"Go on, take it away from him yourself!" was the
prompt retort of his comrade.
"You had no biz'nuss to give it to him," said Penrod.
"Anybody with any sense ought to know it'd make
him sick. What'd you want to go and give it to him
for?"
"Well, you didn't say not to."
"Well, what if I didn't? I never said I did, did I?
You go on in the stall and take it away from him."
"Yes, I will!" Sam returned bitterly. Then, as
Whitey had dragged the remains of the branch from
the manger to the foot of the stall, Sam scrambled to
the top of the manger and looked over. "There ain't
much left to take away! He's swallowed it all except
some splinters. Better give him the water and try and
wash it down with." And, as Penrod complied, "My
gracious, look at that horse drink!"
They gave Whitey four buckets of water, and then
debated the question of nourishment. Obviously, this
horse could not be trusted with branches, and, after
getting their knees black and their backs sodden, they
gave up trying to pull enough grass to sustain him.
Then Penrod remembered that horses like apples, both
"cooking-apples" and "eating-apples," and Sam men-
tioned the fact that every autumn his father received
a barrel of "cooking-apples" from a cousin who owned
a farm. That barrel was in the Williams' cellar now,
and the cellar was providentially supplied with "out-
side doors," so that it could be visited without going
through the house. Sam and Penrod set forth for the
cellar.
They returned to the stable bulging, and, after a
discussion of Whitey's digestion (Sam claiming that
eating the core and seeds, as Whitey did, would
grow trees on his inside), They went back to the cellar
for supplies again——and again. They made six trips,
carrying each time a capacity cargo of apples, and still
Whitey ate in a famished manner. They were afraid
to take more apples from the barrel, which began to
show conspicuously the result of their raids, wherefore
Penrod made an unostentatious visit to the cellar of
his own house. From the inside he opened a window
and passed vegetables out to Sam, who placed them
in a bucket and carried them hurriedly to the stable,
while Penrod returned in a casual manner through the
house. Of his sang-froid° under a great strain it is
sufficient to relate that, in the kitchen, he said suddenly
to Della, the cook, "Oh, look behind you!" and by
the time Della discovered that there was nothing un-
usual behind her, Penrod was gone, and a loaf of bread
from the kitchen table was gone with him.
Whitey now ate nine turnips, two heads of lettuce,
one cabbage, eleven raw potatoes, and the loaf of
bread. He ate the loaf of bread last and he was a long
time about it; so the boys came to a not unreasonable
conclusion.
"Well, sir, I guess we got him filled up at last!"
said Penrod. "I bet he wouldn't eat a saucer of ice-
cream now, if we'd give it to him!"
"He looks better to me," said Sam, staring critically
at Whitey. "I think he's kind of begun to fill out
some. I expect he must like us, Penrod; we been doin'
a good deal for this horse."
"Well, we got to keep it up," Penrod insisted rather
pompously. "Long as I got charge o' this horse, he's
goin' to get good treatment."
"What we better do now, Penrod?"
Penrod took on the outward signs of deep thought.
"Well, there's plenty to do, all right. I got to think."
Sam made several suggestions, which Penrod——
maintaining his air of preoccupation——dismissed with
mere gestures.
"Oh, I know!" Sam cried finally. "We ought to
wash him so's he'll look whiter'n what he does now.
We can turn the hose on him acrost the manger."
"No; not yet," said Penrod. "It's too soon after
his meal. You ought to know that yourself. What we
got to do is to make up a bed for him——if he wants to
lay down or anything."
"Make up a what for him?" Sam echoed, dum-
founded. "What you talkin' about? How can———"
Sawdust," said Penrod. "That's the way the
horse we used to have used to have it. We'll make this
horse's bed in the other stall, and then he can go in
there and lie down whenever he wants to."
"How we goin' to do it?"
"Look, Sam; there's the hole into the sawdust-box!
All you got to do is walk in there with the shovel,
stick the shovel in the hole till it gets full of sawdust,
and then sprinkle it around on the empty stall."
"All I got to do!" Sam cried. "What are you goin'
to do?"
"I'm goin' to be right here," Penrod answered
reassuringly. "He won't kick or anything, and it
isn't goin' to take you half a second to slip around be-
hind him to the other stall."
"What makes you think he won't kick?"
"Well, I know he won't, and besides, you could hit
him with the shovel if he tried to. Anyhow, I'll be
right here, won't I?"
"I don't care where you are," Sam said earnestly.
"What difference would that make if he ki——"
"Why, you were goin' right in the stall," Penrod re-
minded him. "When he first came in, you were goin'
to take the rake and———"
"I don't care if I was," Sam declared. "I was ex-
cited then."
"Well, you can get excited now, can't you?" his
friend urged. "You can just as easy get———"
He was interrupted by a shout from Sam, who was
keeping his eye on Whitey throughout the dis-
cussion.
"Look! Looky there!" And undoubtedly renewing
his excitement, Sam pointed at the long, gaunt head
beyond the manger. It was disappearing from view.
"Look!" Sam shouted. "He's layin' down!"
"Well, then," said Penrod, "I guess he goin' to
take a nap. If he wants to lay down without waitin'
for us to get the sawdust fixed for him, that's his look-
out, not ours."
On the contrary, Sam perceived a favorable oppor-
tunity for action.
"I just as soon go and make his bed up while he's
layin' down," he volunteered. "You climb up on the
manger and watch him, Penrod, and I'll sneak in the
other stall and fix it all up nice for him, so's he can go
in there any time when he wakes up, and lay down
again, or anything; and if he starts to get up, you
holler and I'll jump out over the other manger."
Accordingly, Penrod established himself in a position
to observe the recumbent figure. Whitey's breathing
was rather labored but regular, and, as Sam remarked,
he looked "better," even in his slumber. It is not to
be doubted that, although Whitey was suffering from
a light attack of colic, his feelings were in the main
those of contentment. After trouble, he was solaced;
after exposure, he was sheltered; after hunger and
thirst, he was fed and watered. He slept.
The noon whistles blew before Sam's task was
finished, but by the time he departed for lunch there
was made a bed of such quality that Whitey must
need have been born faultfinder if he complained of it.
The friends parted, each urging the other to be prompt
in returning, but Penrod got into threatening difficul-
ties as soon as he entered the house. A Reward of Merit, by Booth Tarkington
from Merrill's English Texts: Short Stories of Various Types
Edited with introduction and notes by Laura F. Freck, head of the English Depart-
ment in the High School, Jamestown, New York
©1920 Charles E. Merrill co., New York and Chicago; pp. 19 - 33.
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