If I gave titles to my posts here, this one would be called Unexpected Bounties of the Internet. I've been reading Ivanhoe recently, and this has me all curious about Robin Hood - mostly, about the Robin Hood books I read when I was young. So off I went to trusty Google and started rooting around, looking for information, both about the fabled outlaw and about the books written about him, especially the ones I've read. I haven't read as many as it seems: I had one as a child that I read over and over, to the point of memorizing - I don't know which one it is though. It's got the story of Robin killing a deer (a "hart") on a kind of dare from the sheriff's men - hthey go to arrest him, he shoots one of them and flees... then the usual stuff, how he met Little John, Friar Tuck, Allen-a-Dale and the rest... Finally, Maid Marion in the guise of a page boy turns up, and later King Richard. Unfortunately, this plot description fits a great many Robin Hood books, so hasn't been much help in figuring out which this was.

I did track down another Robin Hood book I read - Major Charles Gilson's 1940 tome, The Adventures of Robin Hood. I read this sucker in one day, while I was sick abed - a fact I find in some old notes... This one departs fromt he usual stories - Robin is son of Alfred of Sherwood, a Saxon on the model of Cedric the Saxon. This worthy is attacked by evil Normans who kill the father, carry off the daughter (for here Maid Marion and Robin Hood are bother and sister) - the rest goes roughly as usual, with Marion marrying Allen-a-Dale...

All that is entertaining and edifying - but then, thinking back on the books I read as a child - I tried typing "rustler stagecoach children book" in Google - and came up with Calico the Wonder Horse, or the Saga of Stinky Stewy - one of the really wonderful books of my youth. I read this thing - read it from the time I learned how to read, and read it, probably, a bit beyond the time I was maybe of an age to be reading it - I read it, in sooth, until the book disintegrated in my hands. It is no more, it has long since passed on to the plane of pure memory... But I remember it, and remember it with great love.

Well - it was written and illustrated by one Virginia Lee Burton (who also illustrated a Robin Hood book, that I don't think I ever saw, unfortunately) - she also wrote Katy and the Big Snow - about a snowplow named Katy and a big snow - with a wonderful map of a town showing what Katy plowed... and The Little House, about a little house, formerly in the country, but slowly swallowed by a vast metropolis - a conceit recently appropriated in the Oscar nominated Triplettes de Belleville.... Both of those books - fine, worthy efforts - are pretty concventional looking... But Calico the Wonder Horse - no, not really. It is drawn in a sharp, angular style, emulating woodprints - it is spare and efficient, in picture and text - "Her nose was so keen she could track a bee through a blizzard" - with a tight, clever story, involving rustlers, a box canyon, stagecoach robbers, narrow roads carved from the sides of sheer cliffs, a stampede, and Christmas being saved... I read this as a child, read it until the book fell apart, but read it before I was apt to take the time to remember the author or even the title of a book - and thus could remmeber this thing in all the detail I wanted to, but had little hope of identifying it. But 4 words in Google later - there it is.