Chapter 1 - Page 2

kindness so that I won't know him thereafter wherever I find him.
I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track
from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo
Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him - he will tell you so. Many a
time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn,
"Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me." Then he
goes to sleep. He knows he can trust me, because I have a
reputation. A scout horse that has a reputation does not play with
it.

My mother was all American - no alkali-spider about HER, I can tell
you; she was of the best blood of Kentucky, the bluest Blue-grass
aristocracy, very proud and acrimonious - or maybe it is
ceremonious. I don't know which it is. But it is no matter; size
is the main thing about a word, and that one's up to standard. She
spent her military life as colonel of the Tenth Dragoons, and saw a
deal of rough service - distinguished service it was, too. I mean,
she CARRIED the Colonel; but it's all the same. Where would he be
without his horse? He wouldn't arrive. It takes two to make a
colonel of dragoons. She was a fine dragoon horse, but never got
above that. She was strong enough for the scout service, and had
the endurance, too, but she couldn't quite come up to the speed
required; a scout horse has to have steel in his muscle and
lightning in his blood.

My father was a bronco. Nothing as to lineage - that is, nothing
as to recent lineage - but plenty good enough when you go a good
way back. When Professor Marsh was out here hunting bones for the
chapel of Yale University he found skeletons of horses no bigger
than a fox, bedded in the rocks, and he said they were ancestors of
my father. My mother heard him say it; and he said those skeletons
were two million years old, which astonished her and made her
Kentucky pretensions look small and pretty antiphonal, not to say
oblique. Let me see. . . . I used to know the meaning of those
words, but . . . well, it was years ago, and 'tisn't as vivid now
as it was when they were fresh. That sort of words doesn't keep,
in the kind of climate we have out here. Professor Marsh said
those skeletons were fossils. So that makes me part blue grass and
part fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have
to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon. I am satisfied
with it. And am a happy horse, too, though born out of wedlock.

And now we are back at Fort Paxton once more, after a forty-day
scout, away up as far as the Big Horn. Everything quiet. Crows
and Blackfeet squabbling - as usual - but no outbreaks, and
settlers feeling fairly easy.

The Seventh Cavalry still in garrison, here; also the Ninth
Dragoons, two