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that the General, seeing as he was a bossman, would have a real fine place where he lived. But he didn’t. And all along, for more’n three years, till we come here, he never did. Course now I know why. We had to fight to get it. But then it seemed strange that he lived in jest any old place, nothing at all to where Andy and Jim lived—or a lot of the folks we used to visit and he’d talk to ‘em. The house where we lived in that warm country was jest an old, knock-down kind of a place, with a bit of a shed round the back for the horses. There warn’t no fields or rails or none o’ that. Still, we didn’t need ‘em, ‘cause we was out and about pretty well all the time.
    I got to know the people who lived with the General. There was the young dark-haired fella who’d been on the mountain—Major Taylor—and another called Colonel Long, and some more, too. But they only talked to the General and rode round with him. The most important people was two black fellas called Perry and Meredith. Perry had the real important things to do. He used to clean the General’s boots and hand him his big gloves when he came out to ride me, and he’d bring him cups of coffee and things to eat and all the rest of it. Sometimes he’d actually scold the General—the others never did that—like he’d say, “Marse Robert, you jest got this here coat in sech a state as Ah never seed. Ah’m goin’ to have a real job to get it right.” Or he’d say, “You jest see you’s back in time for dinner, Marse Robert—ain’t no sense in lettin’ it spoil.” And Marse Robert’d say, “Very well, Perry,” or, “Couldn’t be helped, Perry,” or some sech. The white fellas, Marse Taylor and the others, they mostly talked very respectful and did whatever the General said, riding here and there with him. It was really on account of Perry and Meredith that I got to thinking of the General as “Marse Robert.” I wanted to feel I was as close to him as Perry was.
    I soon got to know what we was to do, me and Marse Robert. It was everlasting riding around and making the gray soldiers dig big ditches. And my gracious, didn’t they jest about have to dig? All up and down the land there was crowds and crowds of ‘em, digging and sweating in that thick, watery heat, along by the creeks and sometimes near the salt water. And every day Marse Robert used to ride up and down to make sure they got on with it. He’d go for miles. Sometimes he’d ride Brown-Roan, but more often it’d be me. I’ll tell you it was real hard work in that weather, but I never let up. I wanted to stay with Marse Robert more’n I wanted anything else, and I thought that if I showed any signs of being a quitter, maybe he’d start looking for a better horse.
    What happened, though, was that as the weeks went by, me and Marse Robert gradually got ‘bout as close together as a man and a horse can get. When we was riding alone, he often used to talk to me, and I got to feeling I was talking back to him. He made me feel that without me he wouldn’t be able to do a durned thing. Like I said, he was really a kind of a horse hisself. However far we’d gone and however much he had to see to those digging men, he always used to see to me first. We’d get some place, and first off he’d get the saddle and bridle off me and make sure I had a drink and a nose bag or else somewhere to graze, and he’d see that I was in the shade—or at any rate that there
was
some shade where I could get to it if’n I wanted. He made me feel as important as Perry. He treated me like I was the most ‘spensive thing he had in the world, and pretty soon I got to believing it myself. I lived up to it, you might say. He warn’t much o’ one for games and tricks, Marse Robert—not like Jim. But then, Tom, you see,