“The consequences of their imagining this about me were many. The first was, that they kept me apart from the others, fed me better, led me more often, and harnessed me up earlier. They harnessed me first when I was in my third year. I remember the first time, the equerry himself, who imagined that I was his, began, with a crowd of grooms, to harness me, expecting from me some ebullition of temper or contrariness. They put leather straps on me, and conducted me into the stalls. They laid on my back a wide leather cross, and attached it to the thills, so that I should not kick; but I was only waiting an opportunity to show my gait, and my love for work.
“They marvelled because I went like an old horse. They began to drive me, and I began to practise trotting. Every day I made greater and greater improvement, so that in three months the general himself, and many others, praised my gait. But this was a strange thing: for the very reason that they imagined that I was the equerry’s, and not theirs, my gait had for them an entirely different significance.
“The stallions, my brothers, were put through their paces; their time was reckoned; people came to see them; they were driven in gilded droshkies. Costly saddles were put upon them. But I was driven in the equerry’s simple droshkies, when he had business at Chesmenka and other manor-houses. All this resulted from the fact that I was piebald, but more than all from the fact that I was, according to their idea, not the property of the count, but of the equerry.
“Tomorrow, if we are alive, I will tell you what a serious influence upon me was exercised by this right of proprietorship which the equerry arrogated to himself.”
All that day the horses treated Kholstomír with great consideration; but Nester, from old custom, rode him into the field. But Nester’s ways were so rough! The muzhik’s gray stallion, coming toward the drove, whinnied: and again the chestnut filly coquettishly replied to him.