Old Silver, A Story Of The Gray Horse Truck

________________________________________________
Title:     Old Silver, A Story Of The Gray Horse Truck
Author: Sewell Ford [More Titles by Ford]

Down in the heart of the skyscraper district, keeping watch and ward over those presumptuous, man-made cliffs around which commerce heaps its Fundy tides, you will find, unhandsomely housed on a side street, a hook and ladder company, known unofficially and intimately throughout the department as the Gray Horse Truck.

Much like a big family is a fire company. It has seasons of good fortune, when there are neither sick leaves nor hospital cases to report; and it has periods of misfortune, when trouble and disaster stalk abruptly through the ranks. Gray Horse Truck company is no exception. Calm prosperity it has enjoyed, and of swift, unexpected tragedy it has had full measure. Yet its longest mourning and most sincere, was when it lost Old Silver.

Although some of the men of Gray Horse Truck had seen more than ten years' continuous service in the house, not one could remember a time when Old Silver had not been on the nigh side of the poles. Mikes and Petes and Jims there had been without number. Some were good and some were bad, some had lasted years and some only months, some had been kind and some ugly, some stupid and some clever; but there had been but one Silver, who had combined all their good traits as well as many of their bad ones.

Horses and men, Silver had seen them come and go. He had seen probationers rise step by step to battalion and deputy chiefs, win shields and promotion or meet the sudden fate that is their lot. All that time Silver's name-board had swung over his old stall, and when the truck went out Silver was to be found in his old place on the left of the poles. Driver succeeded driver, but one and all they found Silver first under the harness when a station hit, first to jump forward when the big doors rolled back, and always as ready to do his bit on a long run as he was to demand his four quarts when feeding-time came.

Before the days of the Training Stable, where now they try out new material, Silver came into the service. That excellent institution, therefore, cannot claim the credit of his selection. Perhaps he was chosen by some shrewd old captain, who knew a fire-horse when he saw one, even in the raw; perhaps it was only a happy chance which put him in the business. At any rate, his training was the work of a master hand.

Silver was not one of the fretting kind, so at the age of fifteen he was apple-round, his legs were straight and springy, and his eyes as full and bright as those of a school-boy at a circus. The dapples on his gray flanks were as distinct as the under markings on old velours, while his tail had the crisp whiteness of a polished steel bit on a frosty morning. Unless you had seen how shallow were his molar cups or noted the length of his bridle teeth, would you have guessed him not more than six.

As for the education of Silver, its scope and completeness, no outsider would have given credence to the half of it. When Lannigan had driven the truck for three years, and had been cronies with Silver for nearly five, it was his habit to say, wonderingly:

"He beats me, Old Silver does. I git onto some new wrinkle of his every day. No; 'taint no sorter use to tell his tricks; you wouldn't believe, nor would I an' I hadn't seen with me two eyes."

In the way of mischief Silver was a star performer. What other fire-horse ever mastered the intricacies of the automatic halter release? It was Silver, too, that picked from the Captain's hip-pocket a neatly folded paper and chewed the same with malicious enthusiasm. The folded paper happened to be the Company's annual report, in the writing of which the Captain had spent many weary hours.

Other things besides mischief however, had Silver learned. Chief of these was to start with the jigger. Sleeping or waking, lying or standing, the summons that stirred the men from snoring ease to tense, rapid action, never failed to find Silver alert. As the halter shank slipped through the bit-ring that same instant found Silver gathered for the rush through the long narrow lane leading from his open stall to the poles, above which, like great couchant spiders, waited the harnesses pendant on the hanger-rods. It was unwise to be in Silver's way when that little brazen voice was summoning him to duty. More than one man of Gray Horse Truck found that out.

Once under the harness Silver was like a carved statue until the trip-strap had been pulled, the collar fastened and the reins snapped in. Then he wanted to poke the poles through the doors, so eager was he to be off. It was no fault of Silver's that his team could not make a two-second hitch.

With the first strain at the traces his impatience died out. A sixty-foot truck starts with more or less reluctance. Besides, Silver knew that before anything like speed could be made it was necessary either to mount the grade to Broadway or to ease the machine down to Greenwich Street. It was traces or backing-straps for all that was in you, and at the end a sharp turn which never could have been made had not the tiller-man done his part with the rear wheels.

But when once the tires caught the car-tracks Silver knew what to expect. At the turn he and his team mates could feel Lannigan gathering in the reins as though for a full stop. Next came the whistle of the whip. It swept across their flanks so quickly that it was practically one stroke for them all. At the same moment Lannigan leaned far forward and shot out his driving arm. The reins went loose, their heads went forward and, as if moving on a pivot, the three leaped as one horse. Again the reins tightened for a second, again they were loosened. When the bits were pulled back up came three heads, up came three pairs of shoulders and up came three pairs of forelegs; for at the other end of the lines, gripped vice-like in Lannigan's big fist, was swinging a good part of Lannigan's one hundred and ninety-eight pounds.

Left to themselves each horse would have leaped at a different instant. It was that one touch of the lash and the succeeding swing of Lannigan's bulk which gave them the measure, which set the time, which made it possible for less than four thousand pounds of horse-flesh to jump a five-ton truck up the street at a four-minute clip.

For Silver all other minor pleasures in life were as nothing to the fierce joy he knew when, with a dozen men clinging to the hand-rails, the captain pulling the bell-rope and Lannigan, far up above them all, swaying on the lines, the Gray Horse Truck swept up Broadway to a first call-box.

It was like trotting to music, if you've ever done that. Possibly you could have discovered no harmony at all in the confused roar of the apparatus as it thundered past. But to the ears of Silver there were many sounds blended into one. There were the rhythmical beat of hoofs, the low undertone of the wheels grinding the pavement, the high note of the forged steel lock-opener as it hammered the foot-board, the mellow ding-dong of the bell, the creak of the forty-and fifty-foot extensions, the rattle of the iron-shod hooks, the rat-tat-tat of the scaling ladders on the bridge and the muffled drumming of the leather helmets as they jumped in the basket.

With the increasing speed all these sounds rose in pitch until, when the team was at full-swing, they became one vibrant theme--thrilling, inspiring, exultant--the action song of the Truck.

To enjoy such music, to know it at its best, you must leap in the traces, feel the swing of the poles, the pull of the whiffle-trees, the slap of the trace-bearers; and you must see the tangled street-traffic clear before you as if by the wave of a magician's wand.

Of course it all ended when, with heaving flanks and snorting nostrils you stopped before a building, where thin curls of smoke escaped from upper windows. Generally you found purring beside a hydrant a shiny steamer which had beaten the truck by perhaps a dozen seconds. Then you watched your men snatch the great ladders from the truck, heave them up against the walls and bring down pale-faced, staring-eyed men and women. You saw them tear open iron shutters, batter down doors, smash windows and do other things to make a path for the writhing, white-bodied, yellow-nosed snakes that uncoiled from the engine and were carried wriggling in where the flames lapped along baseboard and floor-beams. You saw the little ripples of smoke swell into huge, cream-edged billows that tumbled out and up so far above that you lost sight of them.

Sometimes there came dull explosions, when smoke and flame belched out about you. Sometimes stones and bricks and cornices fell near you. But you were not to flinch or stir until Lannigan, who watched all these happenings with critical and unwinking eyes, gave the word.

And after it was all over--when the red and yellow flames had ceased to dance in the empty window spaces, when only the white steam-smoke rolled up through the yawning roof-holes--the ladders were re-shipped, you left the purring engines to drown out the last hidden spark, and you went prancing back to your House, where the lonesome desk-man waited patiently for your return.

No loping rush was the homeward trip. The need for haste had passed. Now came the parade. You might toss your head, arch your neck, and use all your fancy steps: Lannigan didn't care. In fact, he rather liked to have you show off a bit. The men on the truck, smutty of face and hands, joked across the ladders. The strain was over. It was a time of relaxing, for behind was duty well done.

Then came the nice accuracy of swinging a sixty-foot truck in a fifty-foot street and of backing through a fourteen-foot door wheels which spanned thirteen feet from hub rim to hub rim.

After unhooking there was the rubbing and the extra feeding of oats that always follows a long run. How good it was to be bedded down after this lung stretching, leg limbering work.

Such was the life which Old Silver was leading when there arrived disaster. It came in the shape of a milk leg. Perhaps it was caused by over-feeding, but more likely it resulted from much standing in stall during a fortnight when the runs had been few and short.

It behaved much as milk legs usually do. While there was no great pain the leg was unhandsome to look upon, and it gave to Old Silver a clumsiness of movement he had never known before.

Industriously did Lannigan apply such simple remedies as he had at hand. Yet the swelling increased until from pastern to hock was neither shape nor grace. Worst of all, in getting on his feet one morning, Silver barked the skin with a rap from his toe calks. Then it did look bad. Of course this had to happen just before the veterinary inspector's monthly visit.

"Old Silver, eh?" said he. "Well, I've been looking for him to give out. That's a bad leg there, a very bad leg. Send him up to the hospital in the morning, and I'll have another gray down here. It's time you had a new horse in his place."

Lannigan stepped forward to protest. It was only a milk leg. He had cured such before. He could cure this one. Besides, he couldn't spare Silver, the best horse on his team.

But the inspector often heard such pleas.

"You drivers," said he, "would keep a horse going until he dropped through the collar. To hear you talk anyone would think there wasn't another horse in the Department. What do you care so long as you get another gray?"

Very much did Lannigan care, but he found difficulty in putting his sentiments into words. Besides, of what use was it to talk to a blind fool who could say that one gray horse was as good as another. Hence Lannigan only looked sheepish and kept his tongue between his teeth until the door closed behind the inspector. Then he banged a ham-like fist into a broad palm and relieved his feelings in language both forceful and picturesque. This failed to mend matters, so Lannigan, putting an arm around the old gray's neck, told Silver all about it. Probably Silver misunderstood, for he responded by reaching over Lannigan's shoulder and chewing the big man's leather belt. Only when Lannigan fed to him six red apples and an extra quart of oats did Silver mistrust that something unusual was going to happen. Next morning, sure enough, it did happen.

Some say Lannigan wept. As to that none might be sure, for he sat facing the wall in a corner of the bunk-room. No misunderstanding could there have been about his remarks, muttered though they were. They were uncomplimentary to all veterinary inspectors in general, and most pointedly uncomplimentary to one in particular. Below they were leading Old Silver away to the hospital.

Perhaps it was that Silver's milk leg was stubborn in yielding to treatment. Perhaps the folks at the horse hospital deemed it unwise to spend time and effort on a horse of his age. At any rate, after less than a week's stay, he was cast into oblivion. They took away the leaden number medal, which for more than ten years he had worn on a strap around his neck, and they turned him over to a sales-stable as carelessly as a battalion chief would toss away a half-smoked cigar.

Now a sales-stable is a place where horse destinies are shuffled by reckless and unthinking hands. Also its doors open on the four corners of the world's crossed highways. You might go from there to find your work waiting between the shafts of a baker's cart just around the corner, or you might be sent across seas to die miserably of tsetse stings on the South African veldt.

Neither of these things happened to Silver. It occurred that his arrival at the sales-stable was coincident with a rush order from the Street Cleaning Department. So there he went. Fate, it seemed, had marked him for municipal service.

There was no delay about his initiation. Into his forehoofs they branded this shameful inscription: D. S. C. 937, on his back they flung a forty-pound single harness with a dirty piece of canvas as a blanket. They hooked him to an iron dump-cart, and then, with a heavy lashed whip, they haled him forth at 5.30 a.m. to begin the inglorious work of removing refuse from the city streets.

Perhaps you think Old Silver could not feel the disgrace, the ignominy of it all. Could you have seen the lowered head, the limp-hung tail, the dulled eyes and the dispirited sag of his quarters, you would have thought differently.

It is one thing to jump a hook and ladder truck up Broadway to the relief of a fire-threatened block, and quite another to plod humbly along the curb from ash-can to ash-can. How Silver did hate those cans. Each one should have been for him a signal to stop. But it was not. In consequence, he was yanked to a halt every two minutes.

Sometimes he would crane his neck and look mournfully around at the unsightly leg which he had come to understand was the cause of all his misery. There would come into his great eyes a look of such pitiful melancholy that one might almost fancy tears rolling out. Then he would be roused by an exasperated driver, who jerked cruelly on the lines and used his whip as if it had been a flail.

When the cart was full Silver must drag it half across the city to the riverfront, and up a steep runway from the top of which its contents were dumped into the filthy scows that waited below. At the end of each monotonous, wearisome day he jogged stiffly to the uninviting stables, where he was roughly ushered into a dark, damp stall.

To another horse, unused to anything better, the life would not have seemed hard. Of oats and hay there were fair quantities, and there was more or less hasty grooming. But to Silver, accustomed to such little amenities as friendly pats from men, and the comradeship of his fellow-workers, it was like a bad dream. He was not even cheered by the fact that his leg, intelligently treated by the stable-boss, was growing better. What did that matter? Had he not lost his caste? Express and dray horses, the very ones that had once scurried into side streets at sound of his hoofs, now insolently crowded him to the curb. When he had been on the truck Silver had yielded the right of way to none, he had held his head high; now he dodged and waited, he wore a blind bridle, and he wished neither to see nor to be seen.

For three months Silver had pulled that hateful refuse chariot about the streets, thankful only that he traversed a section of the city new to him. Then one day he was sent out with a new driver whose route lay along familiar ways. The thing Silver dreaded, that which he had long feared, did not happen for more than a week after the change.

It came early one morning. He had been backed up in front of a big office-building where a dozen bulky cans cumbered the sidewalk. The driver was just lifting one of them to the tail-board when, from far down the street, there reached Silver's ears a well-known sound. Nearer it swept, louder and louder it swelled. The old gray lifted his lowered head in spite of his determination not to look. The driver, too, poised the can on the cart-edge, and waited, gazing.

In a moment the noise and its cause were opposite. Old Silver hardly needed to glance before knowing the truth. It was his old company, the Gray Horse Truck. There was his old driver, there were his old team mates. In a flash there passed from Silver's mind all memory of his humble condition, his wretched state. Tossing his head and giving his tail a swish, he leaped toward the apparatus, neatly upsetting the filled ash-can over the head and shoulders of the bewildered driver.

By a supreme effort Silver dropped into the old lope. A dozen bounds took him abreast the nigh horse, and, in spite of Lannigan's shouts, there he stuck, littering the newly swept pavement most disgracefully at every jump. Thus strangely accompanied, the Gray Horse Truck thundered up Broadway for ten blocks, and when it stopped, before a building in which a careless watchman's lantern had set off the automatic, Old Silver was part of the procession.

It was Lannigan who, in the midst of an eloquent flow of indignant abuse, made this announcement: "Why, boys--it's--it's our Old Silver; jiggered if it ain't!"

Each member of the crew having expressed his astonishment in appropriate words, Lannigan tried to sum it all up by saying:

"Silver, you old sinner! So they've put you in a blanked ash-cart, have they? Well, I'll--I'll be----"

But there speech failed him. His wits did not. There was a whispered council of war. Lannigan made a daring proposal, at which all grinned appreciatively.

"Sure, they'd never find out," said one.

"An' see, his game leg's most as good as new again," suggested another.

It was an unheard-of, audacious, and preposterous proceeding; one which the rules and regulations of the Fire Department, many and varied as they are, never anticipated. But it was adopted. Meanwhile the Captain found it necessary to inspect the interior of the building, the Lieutenant turned his back, and the thing was done.

That same evening an ill-tempered and very dirty ash-cart driver turned up at the stables with a different horse from the one he had driven out that morning, much to the mystification of himself and certain officials of the Department of Street Cleaning.

Also, there pranced back as nigh horse of the truck a big gray with one slightly swollen hind leg. By the way he held his head, by the look in his big, bright eyes, and by his fancy stepping one might have thought him glad to be where he was. And it was so. As for the rest, Lannigan will tell you in strict confidence that the best mode of disguising hoof-brands until they are effaced by new growth is to fill them with axle-grease. It cannot be detected.

Should you ever chance to see, swinging up lower Broadway, a hook-and-ladder truck drawn by three big grays jumping in perfect unison, note especially the nigh horse--that's the one on the left side looking forward. It will be Old Silver who, although now rising sixteen, seems to be good for at least another four years of active service.

[The end]
Sewell Ford's short story: Old Silver, A Story Of The Gray Horse Truck

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN