FullReads

When the message came to his house, however, it caused him great distress, for as he told his wife, he did not want to be killed in the least; he did not wish to run the risk of being killed or even hurt. Besides he had never been on horseback in his life. He had a buffalo that ploughed his fields, and it is true that occasionally, tired with the day’s work, he had ridden home on its back when the sun sank into the west, but he was sure that if he got on the back of a horse it would immediately divine that he was ignorant of the art of riding, did not mau as he said, and he would be thrown to the ground and hurt, killed maybe. Who could tell?

Again his clever wife came to the rescue. “You must go to the fight whether you want to or not,” said she. “The king has given orders and he must be obeyed. To disobey the king is more dangerous than seeing a bear or even fighting a snake, so go you must. As to riding, that is easily managed. Bring your pony here and I will show you how to ride without danger.”

On the never-to-be-forgotten day when the whole family went into the jungle to gather nau, they were very poor, but since the fight with the snake in the well, they had become rich, and so now the boh had servants to do his bidding, and he therefore called one of them to saddle his pony and bring it to the door of his house. This was soon done. He took his seat, and then his wife took long pieces of rawhide and fastened his legs, from ankle to knee, on both sides to the stirrups and girths. She knotted them securely so that there would be no chance of his falling off his steed. He was very pleased that he had such a clever wife, who could help him out of every trouble into which he might fall, and rode away well pleased with himself, and soon reached the place where the soldiers were assembled awaiting his appearance before beginning the march.

To have seen him nobody would have thought that he was frightened sick. He sat up bravely, and you would have thought that he was the best horseman in all the hill and water country, but all the time he was turning over in his mind the advice given by his wife when they talked it over the night before. This was what she said to him: “Now, when you get to the soldiers, see them start off. Give all the orders in a very loud, pompous tone. Talk high, and they will think you mau very much (are very clever). Then you can easily find some excuse to get to the rear, and you must stay there till the fighting is all finished.”

There was one party to this arrangement, however, that they had both failed to take into account when making their plans, and that was the pony. They neither remembered that there was a possibility of the pony taking it into his head to carry his master where the latter did not want to go, but that was just what happened, for, when the pony saw all the other horses and the men marching off, he too commenced to move forward. He was a fine big pony and was accustomed to head processions, not to come at the tail end, and so he started off of his own accord. Now we have said that his rider had never been on horseback before, but had often ridden his buffalo from the paddy field when the day’s work of ploughing was over. When a man on a buffalo wishes to stop, he jerks the rope that is fastened to the animal’s nose, and obedient to the signal, it stops. So, when the boh found his steed forging ahead a little faster than suited him, he jerked the reins, expecting the pony to stop, but to his consternation, he found it go all the faster. He jerked harder, the pony broke into a quick trot. He jerked again, the pony began to gallop. He was now thoroughly frightened and called out at the top of his voice, but this only frightened the pony more and it began to gallop just as fast as ever it could, and worse than all, it headed straight for the enemies’ soldiers, whom he could see in the distance getting ready to receive him. He cursed his wife with all his heart. If he could only fall off! She had taken too good precautions against that. He pulled and tugged, but the rawhide was strong; the knots were too tight; and every minute brought him nearer to his enemies. He could hear the shouts of his friends in the distance getting fainter and fainter as the distance increased, calling him to come back. How he wished he could! He swayed from side to side, first on one flank then on the other. The pony now had its head down between its knees, the bit between its teeth, and was tearing along like the wind. It would be hard to say which was the more frightened, the horse or its rider; each frightened the other. But there was a lower depth yet to be reached. In jumping over a hole the saddle slipped to the side, the next instant away it went, turned, and saddle, rider, and all slipped clear around, and Boh Han Me found himself still securely lashed to the saddle, squarely under his horse instead of on it.