OCR Text |
Show 45 Katie Cannon looked in western pants and a big white hat. She rode a palomino stallion which had been loaned by somebody, palominos being fashionable at that time, and had on a fancy shirt and neck scarf, sitting a fancy saddle and bridle encrusted with silver, and the palomino bowed his neck and pranced sideways and she rode him like an old hand, but in that costume she looked so artificial somehow that I was disappointed. I wondered if she liked to ride, and if she would come out to The Ranch and ride with me someday. My horse those days was a black Morgan which somebody had given or traded or paid off my father with when he was a colt less than a year old. Since he was pretty and gentle I made a pet out of him when he was little, feeding him apples and rubbing his ears for him, so by the time he was old enough to ride we'd been friends for two years. Dad had planned to geld him but then found out that he could get papers on him, so he left him intact, hoping for stud fees. I guess he was about four that summer of 1940, with the thick neck of a Morgan. With the wind blowing that wild mane and those widely-set eyes rolling, he could look like a crazy horse. Yet he would lip my shoulder, begging like a child for an apple. I grew cautious though: a grown stallion is no pet. He was black all over, except for a brownish shade around his nose, but no white at all. Black as the ace of spades, my brother Henry said, and so I called him Ace. Late in August I was riding him along the road in front of our place when a car pulled up behind me and stopped. It was Kate in her father's Ford, smiling up at me from the window. She had enough sense not to honk or yell or anything to spook my horse, but even so I had a time urging him up closer to her window, he dancing back and sideways. I let him prance a little before I pulled him down, showing off. |