A Horse's Tale

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - I am Buffalo Bill's horse. I have spent my life under his saddle - with him in it too and he is good for two hundred pounds without his clothes; and there is no telling how much he does weigh when he is out on the war-path and has his batteries belted on. He is over six feet is young hasn't an ounce of waste flesh is straight graceful springy in his motions quick as a cat and has a handsome face and black hair dangling down on his shoulders and is beautiful to look at; and nobody is braver than he is and nobody is stronger except myself. Yes a person that doubts that he is fine to see should see him in his beaded buck-skins on my back and his rifle peeping above his shoulder chasing a hostile trail with me going like the wind and his hair streaming out behind from the shelter of his broad slouch. Yes he is a sight to look at then - and I'm part of it myself. I am his favorite horse out of dozens. Big as he is I have carried him eighty-one miles between nightfall and sunrise on the scout; and I am good for fifty day in and day out and all the time. I am not large but I am built on a business basis. I have carried him thousands and thousands of miles on scout duty for the army and there's not a gorge nor a pass nor a valley nor a fort nor a trading post nor a buffalo-range in the whole sweep of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that we don't know as well as we know the bugle-calls. He is Chief of Scouts to the Army of the Frontier and it makes us very important. In such a position as I hold in the military service one needs to be of good family and possess an education much above the common to be worthy of the place. I am the best-educated horse outside of the hippodrome every-body says and the best-mannered. It may be so it is not for me to say; modesty is the best policy I think. Buffalo Bill taught me the most of what I know my mother taught me much and I taught myself the rest. Lay a row of moccasins before me - Pawnee Sioux Shoshone Cheyenne Blackfoot and as many other tribes as you please - and I can name the tribe every moccasin belongs to by the make of it. Name it in horse-talk and could do it in American if I had speech.