SOON AFTER the battle of Plattsburg the war began to peter out. Both America and England realized they had nothing to fight over. With Napoleon captured and the bloodshed at an end in Europe, the very reasons for the war seemed to disappear. So the whole business was called off. It was almost as simple as that. There were no harsh terms for either side. Nothing but blessed peace.
News of the peace brought great rejoicing. The blockade along the Atlantic coast was lifted. The country began to build a great merchant marine. Men began dreaming of free public schools, of clean prisons, of putting an end to slavery, of settling new lands to the westward.
And in the little village of Randolph, too, progress was afoot. Joel was man-grown now, with a man’s responsibilities. He was chairman of a committee to establish a free public library, and since his cavalry days even white-bearded men came to him for advice in doctoring their horses.
One bitter night in the dead of winter, Joel was on his way to the meetinghouse to discuss the new library. With his skates over his shoulder he stopped to pick up a neighbor, Ezra Fisk, Junior.
Usually the two talked and laughed as they skated up the river. But not this night. The wind blew howling out of the northeast, and a fine snow pricked their faces like so many needle points.
“Well be getting a blizzard if this keeps up,” Ezra yelled, turning his head to one side.
As they came to a bend in the river, Joel swerved to a sudden stop, listening. The wind had picked up a sound—a thin, high quaver. It was a sound that he knew in every part of him. It set his heart to hammering and started up an old aching inside him. “Could it be,” he thought, “the wind is playing tricks? Or could it be the screaking of our skates mixed up in wind?”
And then, and then it came again—the high, vibrating sound, blowing across him, into him, through his earmuffs, through his ears, into his mind. He tried to hold onto it, but the deep-toned thunder of the wind hurled it away.
“Ezra!” he shouted, skating wildly toward the figure pushing against the wind. He caught up to Ezra and spun around, bumping into him, sending him sprawling across the ice.
“Ezra!” he cried excitedly. “ ’Twas the voice of someone I know.”
The bewildered young man picked himself up, rubbing his elbow and knee by turns. “Voice or no voice,” he muttered in annoyance, “be that fit reason for trying to break every bone in my body?”
But Joel had wheeled about and was off like an arrow. The sound had come from somewhere in the direction of Chase’s Inn. In long, hard strides he was skating downriver, the way he had come. Through the whirl of snow he caught a prick of light ahead. He knew it for the familiar lantern on the shed behind the inn. He skated toward it, pulled by some seeming magnetism.
Behind him Ezra was calling, “Wait, you tarnal idiot! I want to see, too.”
But now Joel was ripping off his skates, running and scrambling up the river bank, while the wind lashed at him and tore at his scarf and the heavy skates thumped against his body. He must get to the shed quickly before the sound was lost to him forever. But even as he ran it came again, and Joel cried out, “I’m coming! I’m coming!”
He could see into the shed now, see each stall occupied. He grabbed for the lantern, but it was frozen to the peg. He worked it free, then hurried from stall to stall, lighting the face of each animal. A white face. An iron gray. A chestnut, a brown, a bay. A broad-faced ox. Some had white stripes down their noses, and some had tiny snips or stars. But in all the long row there was not a face he knew.
Slowly, dejectedly, he returned the lantern to its peg, and said to the looming shadow that was Ezra, “I must’ve mistook that whinny for . . . ”
There! It came again, the same thin flutter, the same high, trembling note.
Not waiting for the rumbling echo, not stopping for the lantern, Joel ran stumbling to the front of the inn. There, in the light pouring out the windows of the taproom, he saw a team of six horses hitched to a freight wagon. The horses looked all alike—gaunt, and old, and snow-matted. There was not a proud head nor an arched neck among them.
He rubbed his mittened hand across his eyes, trying to wipe away the wind-tears, trying to see more distinctly. He waited for his heart to stop pounding; waited, not knowing for what he waited. And then into the frosty night the high neighing started up again. Joel saw which horse moved, saw the head raise, saw the tiny ears swivel. It was the littlest horse in the team.
“Ezra!” he shouted. “’Tis the wheel horse—the near one!”
In a flash he was holding the horse’s face in his hands. “My poor Little Bub!” he whispered softly. “My poor, shiv’ring, starved Little Bub.” He breathed on the tiny icicles that hung from the whiskers. Then he lifted Bub’s hoofs, and with his fingernails began to dig out the frozen balls of snow, cursing the teamster who let his horses stand out on a night like this. As each ball of snow came loose, Joel stopped to breathe again on the icicles.
The little horse was trembling—not from cold, but from excitement. He tried to nicker, but all he could manage was a low whimper, like a child or a very old person. It seemed that he had spent himself in neighing, and now wanted only to rest his head in the warm, gentle hands. He nuzzled them feebly.
“Look, Joel! Look at the signboard!” cried Ezra, laughing. “These bags of bones have come to the right place.”
The inn’s signboard swung back and forth, creaking on its hinges. The last line, only a few inches above Little Bub, read: GOOD KEEPING FOR HORSES.
Joel’s eyes seemed to strike sparks in the cold. “You ain’t being funny!” he said angrily, as he pried the last ball of snow free. “And ’tain’t easy to make you understand about this little horse. But I knew him when he could trot faster, run faster, and pull heavier logs than any horse in Vermont! ’Tis the Justin Morgan horse, Ezra. ’Tis the Justin Morgan horse, I tell you!”
The young man moved in closer. “This old beast the horse my father rented?” he cried in awe.
Now Ezra seemed angered, too. With his hand he swept the snow from the horse’s back. “Why, he’s worn a harness so long it’s almost grown on him! What in tunket we waiting for? Let’s go in and tell that teamster a thing or two!”
Covering Little Bub with his coat, Joel gave him a final pat. “Please to let me handle this, Ezra,” he said as he followed the young man into the inn.
At least a dozen men were gathered in the general room, eating and drinking and talking together.
“Gentlemen!” Joel addressed them in a stern voice he scarcely knew as his own. “Who is owner of the six-horse team at the hitching rack?”
“I am!” came a snarl from in front of the fire. “What’s it to ye?”
Joel could see just the back of a chair, a coonskin cap showing above it, and two enormous feet beyond. The feet, in hobnailed boots, were stretched toward the hearth and a blazing fire.
As Joel and Ezra started toward the voice, one man tried to discourage them with a look. Another, older, got up from a bench and tugged at Joel’s sleeve. “Better give him the go-by, feller,” he said. “He’s nasty as a polecat.”
Joel shook his head. “I got this to do,” he said, and strode over to the bulky creature.
The man seemed in a trance. The face was half hidden behind a shag of whiskers, and the yellow-green eyes stared straight ahead like those of an owl. Across the man’s lap lay a bull-hide whip, and in one hand he held a tankard of ale. The arm holding the ale waved the young man away, and the drink spattered and some of it struck the fire with a hiss.
Joel gazed at the whip and blurted out, “That wheel horse, the near one—what’ll you take for him?”
The yellow-green eyes narrowed until they were no more than slits. Could this Simple Simon have meant the littlest horse?
Ezra, impatient with the delay, was stamping snow from his feet, and it made Joel think of the snowballs packed in Bub’s hoofs. He repeated the question. Louder this time.
It was all the teamster could do not to laugh outright. For days he had been wondering how soon he would have to replace every horse in the hitch. And now someone wanted to buy the littlest one of all! He hunched forward in his chair, placed the tankard on the floor, and began flicking his whip, narrowly missing Joel’s legs.
“Look-a-here, feller,” his surly voice sounded out, “that little beast pulls better than the hull kit and caboodle. I wouldn’t hear o’ selling him. No-wise! Why, only a fortnight ago a man offered twenty dollar for him.”
There was a shuffling of feet as everyone in the room gathered about. Joel turned away from the teamster. Breaking through the ring of men, he found Miller Chase. “Sir,” he whispered earnestly, “the Morgan horse—he’s right here at our hitching rack! That teamster owns him, and if I don’t buy him tonight, sir, he may be dead in the morning. I got to have twenty-five dollars!”
Miller Chase was breaking a stick of cinnamon into a bowl of punch. He spooned it, thinking quickly and carefully before replying. At last he said, “Joel, lad, you are buying into my business, and you may be white-haired and old when it’s all paid for. Times is hard. What’s the sense getting deeper in debt on a nearly dead beast?” He looked up with kindliness in his eyes. “The Morgan must have considerable age on him, and don’t you know he’s liable to be rheumaticky and die soon?”
“Yes, yes, I know!” Joel spoke impatiently now. “But it’s different with Little Bub, sir. He’s a friend, and you don’t turn down a friend just because he’s old.”
The miller smiled. And then as he caught sight of Mistress Chase sailing into the room, he lowered his voice. “All right, son, I’ll loan you whatever it takes,” he said, opening the cash box beneath the counter.
Joel felt the rough, gnarled hands close around his, felt the moneybag tucked into his palm. He tried to speak, but a choking filled his throat. Instead, he gripped the miller’s hand in a clasp so hard it made the man wince. Then he went back to the teamster, who was slyly glancing around, wondering if he had lost his serious-eyed customer.
“I can offer you twenty-five dollars,” Joel said, praying under his breath that it would be enough.
The huge man’s eyes lighted greedily. “The crowbait’s yours!” he laughed as he pocketed the money and picked up his tankard of ale.
And so, at long last, Little Bub belonged to Joel.
