front of the cutter bar.”
“Don’t you tell me!” Grandfather blurted, but I knew he could see I was right. As he got up off his knees, the toe of his boot caught the spike of wire and turned it up so it wouldn’t drag. “Ain’t nothing the matter with that,” he said as he climbed up onto the mowing-machine seat. “Now pass me them lines, and stand back so’s you don’t get hurt. Whoa! Whoa, colty!”
I knew quite a little about mowing machines. Father had fixed the machinery for most of the neighbors we had in Colorado, and, if I wasn’t in school, he’d always let me help him. He’d traded a colt for an old secondhand mowing machine one winter, and we’d taken it all to pieces, made some new parts, and put it all together again. When Father got done fixing any piece of machinery it had always worked just as well as a new one. I hadn’t had much time to look over Grandfather’s machine, but in one glance I could see that it was in worse shape than the one Father got for the colt. The cutter bar was lying in a tangle of matted clover, two of the knife sections were broken in half, and one was missing altogether. The gears were out of mesh, and there was new red rust on all of them and along the sickle blades. If the team was started with the cutter bar dragging, I knew it might tear things all to pieces.
The yella colt had begun prancing the minute Grandfather shouted, “Whoa, colty!” I snatched up the reins, but before I passed them to Grandfather, I said, “Hadn’t I better put the cutter bar up before it drags and breaks something?”
“Leave be! Leave be!” Grandfather shouted. “Pass me them reins and stand back out the way!”
I should have kept quiet but, as I passed him the lines, I asked, “Hadn’t I better get an oil can?”
“Stand back! Stand back, I tell you!” Grandfather snapped. Then he spanked the reins up and down, and shouted, “Gitap! Gitap!”
The bay mare didn’t move an inch when Grandfather shouted, but the yella colt went off like a skyrocket—and in the same direction: straight up. He danced a jig on his hind feet, and kept his front ones pawing up and down like a swimming dog’s. When he came down, he rammed into the collar and, of course, broke the rotten old piece of barbed wire on the whiffle-tree. It held just long enough to lurch the mowing machine forward a few inches and make the slipping gears scream. With his outside tug loose, and the screech of the gears behind him, the old buckskin swung around like a slammed gate. He nearly pulled Grandfather off the seat, broke one of the reins, and tore most of his harness off.
Instead of being mad at the yella colt, Grandfather began yelling at me, “Tarnal fool boy! You scairt him! You scairt him! Why didn’t you stand back like I told you? Whoa, colty! Whoa!”
Grandfather was still pulling on the unbroken line. With the yella colt turned around facing him, and with the line through the ring on the harness, it only made the horse pull back harder. “Let go of the line!” I shouted, as I ran toward the buckskin.
“Shut up! Shut up! Get out of the way!” Grandfather yelled back, and kept right on pulling. The collar was hauled tight up around the old horse’s jaws, and he had his feet braced the way a bulldog does when he’s trying to pull a stick out of your hands. I still had the scythe stone in my hand, had got back of the yella colt, and was just ready to hit him and make him jump forward, when the second rein broke and the buckskin sat down with a thud. His rump missed my feet by less than two inches, and Grandfather hollered, “Now see what you done! Why didn’t you keep out the way?”
Grandfather came up and began patting the old horse on the neck. “Poor colty! Poor colty!” he said soothingly. “Tarnal nigh busted the harness all to smithereens, didn’t you? Ralphie, I and you’d better fetch it up to the carriage house and fix it. Awful high-strung hoss, the yella colt. Did you
Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team