Excerpt from "Crazy Good"
The men, sweating and panting, were still holding the colt up to nurse when Dan Messner appeared in the doorway. Messner could be a stern boss; though he had a pleasant counter-side manner with customers, and was liberal about extending credit to local farmers, he could, as one former employee told me, remembering a tense encounter more than sixty years earlier, "look at you when he was displeased in a way that you didn't soon forget." When [Dr. Frank] Scott and [his assistant John] Kelley saw Messner's expression, they smiled sheepishly and both let go at once, allowing Dan Patch to fall back onto the foul straw. The colt, his bad leg askew beneath him, looked up innocently through large brown eyes. "He was," Kelley remembered at age seventy-three, "as gentle as a big dog." But he was also seemingly doomed, like any horse who could not stand up to take nourishment. "Do you want me to get a hammer?" Kelley asked.