44 pages • 1 hour read
Marguerite HenryMisty of Chincoteague
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Sold Rope”
The next morning, Grandpa wakes Paul at dawn after dealing with a tree that has blown onto their house. Paul has spent the night in the truck, and Grandma is worried about him. The horses jump up at the sound of Grandpa’s voice, but Paul tries to keep sleeping until he realizes that he is only wearing his underwear and Grandpa’s coat. He springs up, embarrassed, and Grandpa tells him to come home and eat the breakfast that Grandma has cooked for him. Paul argues that he cannot leave the pony pens; it is the day of the sale, and he must ensure that he and Maureen secure the Phantom and Misty as their own. Paul relents when Grandpa tells him that Maureen can complete the purchase while he goes home to get some rest. Before Paul leaves, they release the Phantom and Misty from the truck, and the two horses gallop into the corral looking for fresh grass.
Maureen rides Watch Eyes to the pony pens just as the men and horses are getting ready for the day’s activity. Trucks from distant states pull into the grounds, and she can hear children calling to their parents about which ponies they want to buy. An oysterman named Tom stops her, offering tickets for a raffle to win a sorrel pony. She thanks him for the offer but is only concerned with finding the fire chief to discuss buying the Phantom and Misty. Tom tells her the fire chief has just left, so she makes her way to the corral to find them.
To Maureen’s horror, she finds the Phantom pulling frantically at a rope around Misty’s neck—a rope that marks the colt as sold. After spotting the fire chief, Maureen desperately explains her and Paul’s plan to buy both horses, and she shows him the money they saved for the purchase. The fire chief is sympathetic but tells her there is nothing he can do because a man named Foster put a down payment on both the Phantom and Misty less than an hour before. He tells Maureen that she can spend the money on candy instead, but she walks away dejectedly, thinking that the fire chief must have never wanted something as badly as she wants Misty and the Phantom.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “A Pony Changes Hands”
The festivities at the pony-penning grounds continue throughout the day, but Paul and Maureen cannot enjoy them knowing that the Phantom and Misty have been sold to someone else. They sadly watch the colts being loaded into their buyers’ trucks, and when Grandpa loads a group of yearlings to take to his farm, they imagine their future selves training those horses just to be sold again. Grandpa tries to cheer them up by promising them a different pony, but they cannot stop thinking about their loss. At the big dinner in the auxiliary dining hall that is usually the highlight of the day, Paul and Maureen can barely touch their food. They watch the Wild West show listlessly, unable to cheer for the men who successfully stay seated on the bucking wild ponies.
Through Thursday and Friday, Paul and Maureen continue in silent sadness, unable even to speak about their loss as the pony-penning celebration draws to a close and the Pied Piper and other wild horses are released to swim back to Assateague. Finally, on Saturday, they begin to discuss everything they should have done differently. If only one of them had talked to the fire chief earlier or had gotten to the pony-penning grounds before anyone else, they could be welcoming the Phantom and Misty into their freshly prepared pen. They decide to spend their money on a new electric toaster for Grandpa and Grandma, so they head downtown to window-shop.
A station wagon suddenly pulls up next to them, and a man leans out to ask where the fire chief lives. A young boy in the passenger seat announces with excitement that he has won the sorrel pony from the raffle. Just then, the fire chief pulls around the corner, and Paul runs to get him. To Paul and Maureen’s shock, the man in the station wagon begins telling the fire chief about winning the pony and asks him if it is possible to back out of the purchase of a mare and young colt he made a few days before: He cannot care for three horses. With a wink, the fire chief tells the man that a boy and girl were interested in those same horses, and he returns the man’s down payment. When they realize what has happened, Maureen kisses the boy out of joy, and Paul enthusiastically shakes everyone’s hands before laughing so loudly that he sounds like a whinnying horse.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “The Wickie”
When Paul and Maureen get the Phantom and Misty home and start to train them, they realize that where colts typically learn to trust humans by watching their mothers, Misty is helping the Phantom learn not to fear them. Misty loves people immediately. She eagerly accepts human affection and begs for attention any time she is ignored. Soon they put a wickie harness around her neck and lead her around the yard. The Phantom grows less fearful when she sees that Paul and Maureen aren’t going to harm her baby, but she still hesitates to approach. In the first weeks, no one can touch her. Covered in flies, she stands in the yard or runs away if someone gets close. Eventually she relents when the flies get too thick, and she realizes she cannot swim in the sea as she had on Assateague.
As the Phantom comes to accept them, Paul and Maureen start getting her ready for a rider, first by tying a band around her chest and then by strapping bags of sand to her back. Slowly, the Phantom becomes tame enough to ride, although they can use only a wickie as a crude set of reins. Try as they might, she refuses to allow a metal bit to be put in her mouth. They are ashamed of their perceived failure to train her correctly, but Grandpa says he is proud of what they have accomplished and that she never has to use a metal bit if she doesn’t want to.
Part 2, Chapters 12-14 Analysis
Once Paul and Maureen have captured the Phantom and are confident that she will not escape, the action shifts to ensuring that she will become their horse. In their minds, she has always been theirs, but as the moment of the sale approaches, they realize that not everyone knows this. The second dramatic climax of the book comes when Maureen arrives at the pony-penning grounds to realize that around Misty’s neck is a rope indicating she has been sold. At this point, it again becomes clear that the Phantom knows that the wrong thing is happening: She pulls violently at the rope, trying to tear it from Misty’s neck. The Phantom herself has also been purchased but adamantly refuses to allow anyone to put a rope around her own neck—a sign of both her wildness and of her refusal to even nominally belong to anyone but Maureen and Paul.
Maureen’s realization that she is too late acts as a wake-up call. Prior to that moment, she had assumed that the Phantom and Misty were destined for the Beebe farm, and all the events to that point seem to have led in that direction. Although to her it is obvious that the horse wants to be with her, she realizes that the pony sale is a bland, official event where the dreams of horses and children do not matter; the dichotomy of The Natural World Versus the Human-Made World is also a dichotomy between the intuitive world of children and the rule-bound world of adults. When Maureen tells Paul about the sale, for the first time the siblings feel as though they are destined to fail. They had managed to capture the Phantom (what should have been the hardest part), but they are thwarted by the simple fact that someone else got to her first. Paul and Maureen spend the rest of the pony-penning events in dream state, but a very different one from what Paul felt while herding the Phantom off Assateague. They no longer feel like the main characters in an epic story of The Relationship Between Humans and Horses; rather, they are simply spectators watching the day-to-day bustle of horses being bought and sold.
Once again, though, an almost miraculous event pulls the Phantom back to them. By chance, they happen to be downtown when Foster, the man who bought Misty and the Phantom, stops to ask them about the fire chief. This puts them at the forefront of the fire chief’s mind when Foster asks to sell the horses back to him, and in an instant their fortunes change. Suddenly, they are able to start work on the plan they had since the day they first saw the Phantom on Assateague: getting her ready to ride and enter into the next year’s race against the Black Comet. Up to Chapter 14, the events of Misty of Chincoteague are nearly all concentrated in a narrow window of a few days surrounding Pony Penning Day. In contrast, Chapter 14 covers almost an entire year, as Paul and Maureen train the Phantom to ride with a wickie harness. This sets up the central climax of the novel: the next Pony Penning Day and the race that Maureen and Paul hope to ride the Phantom in. Although their training proves successful in this respect, the wickie symbolizes the Phantom’s internal wildness, which no amount of human intervention can tame. While she is happy to wear this natural rope, she refuses any human-made tools that most horses wear.
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By Marguerite Henry
