Thoroughbreds Part 15

In actuality there were just two things that stood in the way--two things which his position and wealth could not obviate--his age, and the Porter pride. If Porter had not been dubbed "Honest John" early in life, he might have been saddled with "Proud Porter" later on. The pride had come up out of old Kentucky with all the other useless things--the horse-racing, and the inability to make money, and the fancy for keeping a promise. Something whispered to Crane that Allis would never come to him simply out of love; it might be regard, esteem, a desire to please her parents, a bowing to the evident decree of fate. Perhaps even the very difficulty of conquest made Crane the more determined to win, and made him hasten slowly.

IX

As a rule few visitors went to Ringwood.

John Porter had been too interested in his horses and his home life to care much for social matters. Mrs. Porter was a home-body, too, caring nothing at all for society--at best there was but little of it in Brookfield--except where it was connected with church work. Perhaps that was one reason why Allis had grown so close into her father's life. It was a very small, self-contained household.

Mike Gaynor had become attached to the staff at Ringwood this winter as a sort of a.s.sistant trainer to Porter. Dixon only trained the Ringwood horses during the racing season, Porter always supervising them in winter quarters. Perhaps it was Porter's great cloud of evil fortune which had cast its sinister influence over Mike because of his sympathy for the master of Ringwood; certain it is that the autumn found him quite "on his uppers," as he graphically described his financial standing. An arrangement was made by which Mike's disconsolate horses were fed at Ringwood, and he took care of both strings. This delighted Allis, for she had full confidence in Gaynor's integrity and good sense.

The early winter brought two visitors to Ringwood--Crane, who came quite often, and Mortimer, who went out to the farm a couple of times with Alan.

George Mortimer might be described as an angular young man. His face, large-featured, square-jawed, and bold-topped by broad forehead, suggested the solemnity Alan had found so trying. Of course a young man of his make-up was sure to have notions, and Mortimer's mind was knotted with them; there seemed no soft nor smooth places in his timber. That was why he had reasoned with the butcher by energetically grasping his windpipe the evening that worthy gentleman had expressed himself so distastefully over Allis Porter's contribution to the Reverend Dolman's concert. Perhaps a young man of more subtle grace would have received some grateful recognition for this office, but the matter had been quite closed out so far as Mortimer was concerned; Alan tried to refer to it afterward, but had been curtly stopped.

George Mortimer's chief notion was that work was a great thing, seemingly the chief end of man. Another notion almost equally prominent--he had derived it from his mother--was, that all forms of gambling were extremely bad business. First and foremost in this interdiction stood horse racing. The touch of it that hung like a small cloud over the Brookfield horizon had inspired Mrs. Mortimer, as it had other good people of the surrounding country, with the restricted idea that those who had to do with thoroughbred horses were simply gamblers--betting people. Her home was in Emerson, a dozen miles from Brookfield.

Quite paradoxically, if Allis Porter had not given "The Run of Crusader"--most certainly a racing poem--in the little church, this angular young man with stringent ideas about running horses probably would have never visited Ringwood. Something of the wide sympathy that emanated from her as she told of the gallant horse's death struck into his strong nature, and there commenced to creep into his thoughts at odd intervals a sort of gratuitous pity that she should be inextricably mixed up with race horses. His original honesty of thought and the narrowness of his tuition were apt to make him egotistically sure that the things which appealed to him as being right were incapable of variation.

At first he had liked Alan Porter, with no tremendous amount of unbending; now, because of the interest Allis had excited in him, the liking began to take on a supervisory form, and it was not without a touch of irritation in his voice that Alan informed his sister that he had acquired a second father, and with juvenile malignity attributed the inc.u.mbrance to her seductive influence.

With all these cross purposes at work it can be readily understood that Mortimer's visits to Ringwood were not exactly rose-leaved. In truth, the actors were all too conventionally honest, too unsocialized, to subvert their underlying motives. Allis, with her fine intuition, would have unearthed Mortimer's disapprobation of racing--though he awkwardly strove to hide it--even if Alan had not enlarged upon this point. This knowledge constrained the girl, even drove her into rebellion. She took his misunderstanding as a fault, almost as a weakness, and shocked the young man with carefully prepared racing expressions; reveled with strange abandon in talks of gallops, and trials, and work-outs, and breathers; threw ironmouthed horses, pullers, skates, and divers other equine wonders at his head until he revolted in sullen irritation. In fact they misunderstood each other finely; in truth their different natures were more in harmony two miles apart, the distance that lay between the bank and Ringwood.

By comparison Crane's visits to Ringwood were utopianly complacent.

Strangely enough, Mrs. Porter, opposed to racing as she was, came quite readily under the glamor of his artistic un.o.btrusiveness. He had complete mastery over the science of waiting. His admission to the good lady of a pa.s.sing interest in horses was an apology; there seemed such an utter absence of the betting spirit that the recreation it afforded him condoned the offense.

There was this difference between the two men, the old and the young: Crane knew exactly why he went there, while Mortimer had asked himself more than once, coming back from Ringwood feeling that he had been misunderstood--perhaps even laughed at--why he had gone there at all.

He had no definite plan, even desire; he was impelled to it out of some unrecognized force. It was because of these conditions that the one potter turned his images so perfectly, and the other formed only poor, distorted, often broken, dishes of inferior clay.

It stood in the reason of things, however, that Mortimer, in spite of his uncompromising att.i.tude toward racing, should be touched by its tentacles if he visited at Ringwood.

His first baptism came with much precipitancy on the occasion of his fourth visit to the Porters. He had driven out with Alan to spend his Sat.u.r.day afternoon at Ringwood. An afternoon is not exactly like an evening in the matter of entertaining a guest; something must be done; cigars, or music, or small chatter are insufficient. If one is on the western slope of life's Sierra perhaps a nap may kill the time profitably enough, but this was a case where a young man had to be entertained, a young man difficult of entertainment under the circ.u.mstances.

Alan had some barbarous expedition of juvenile interest on hand; the unearthing of a woodchuck, or it might have been a groundhog, in a back field; but Allis would not become a party to the destruction of animal life for the sport of the thing. She had a much better programme mapped out for Mortimer. Some way she felt that if he could see the thoroughbred horses in their stalls, could come to know them individually, casually though it might be, he would perhaps catch a glimmer of their beautiful characters. So she asked Mr. Mortimer to go and have a look at her pets. Alan would none of it; he was off to his woodchuck or groundhog.

"I'm glad you don't want to go and kill anything," she said, turning gratefully to Mortimer when he refused Alan's invitation, saying that he preferred to look at the horses. "I'll show you Diablo, and Lucretia, and Lauzanne the Despised--he's my horse, and I'm to win a big race with him next year. Gaynor is down at the stables; and I'll give you a tip"-Mortimer winced--"if you want to stand well in with Mike, let him suspect that you're fond of horses."

At the stable door they met Mike Gaynor. Mike usually vacillated between a condition of chronic anger at somebody or something, and an Irish drollery that made people who were sick at heart laugh. Allis was as familiar with his moods as she was with the phases of Lauzanne's temper.

On Mike's face was a map of disaster; the disaster might be trivial or great. That something was wrong the girl knew, but whether it was that a valuable horse was dead, or that a mouse had eaten a hole in a grain bag she could only discover by questioning Gaynor, for there were never degrees of expressed emotion in Mike's facile countenance; either a deep scowl or a broad grin were the two normal conditions.

"What's the matter, Mike?" questioned Allis.

"Mather, is it?" began Gaynor, "it's just this, Miss Allis; if yer father thinks I'm goin' to stand by an' see good colts spiled in their timper just because a rapscallion b'y has got the evil intints av ould Nick himself, thin he's mistook, that's all."

"Who is it Mike--Shandy?"

"That's him, Miss. He's the divil on wheels, bangin' thim horses about as though he was King Juba."

Allis saw that Gaynor was indeed angry.

"I'll speak to father about him, Mike," she answered; "I won't have the horses abused."

"Mark my words, Miss Allis, Diablo'll take it out of his hide some day. The b'y'll monkey wit' him once too often, then there'll be no b'y left."

"May we see the horses, Mike--are they having their lie-down, or anything?"

"Not yet, Miss; they're gettin' the rub-down now; don't ye hear Diablo bastin' the boords av his stall wid that handy off hind-foot av his?"

"There's a filly for yer life," exclaimed the Trainer, rapturously, as he opened gently the door of Lucretia's box stall. "There's the straightest filly iver looked through a halter," he continued, putting his arm with the gentleness of a woman over the brown mare's beautiful neck. "Come here, ould girl," he said, coaxingly, as he drew the haltered head toward the visitors.

Mortimer looked with interest at the big, comfortable box stall, littered a foot deep with bright, clean, yellow straw. How contented and at home the mare appeared! It seemed almost a complete recompense, this attentive care, for the cruelty he imagined race horses suffered.

"You don't tie her up?" he asked.

"Tie her up!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mike, a fine Celtic scorn in his voice; "I'd rather tie up a wife--if I had one," he added by way of extenuation.

"No man would tie up a mare worth tin thousand dollars if she's worth a cent, an' take chances av her throwin' hersilf in the halter; av coorse she's. .h.i.tched fer a bit after a gallop while she's havin' a rub-down, but that's all."

Lucretia's black nozzle came timidly forward, and the soft, velvety upper lip snuggled Allis's cheek.

"She knows ye, Miss," said Mike. "That's the way wit' horses--they're like children; they know friends, an' ye can't fool thim. Now she's sizin' ye up, Mister," as Lucretia sniffed suspiciously at Mortimer's chin, keeping a wary eye on him. "She'll know if ye like horses or not, an' I'd back her opinion agin fifty min's oaths."

Allis watched with nervous interest the investigation. She almost felt that if Lucretia liked her companion--well, it would be something less to dislike in him, at all events. Lucretia seemed turning the thing over in her mind, trying to think it out. There was some mystery about this new comer. Evidently she did not distrust him entirely, else she would have put her ears back a trifle and turned away with a little impatient warning shake of her delicate head. She always turned in that cross manner from Shandy, the stable boy. She had also discovered that the visitor was not completely a horseman; she did not investigate his pockets, nor put her head over his shoulder, as she would have done with Mr. Porter or Mike, or even with one who was a stranger, as was Mortimer, had she felt the unmistakable something which conveyed to her mind that he was of the equine brotherhood.

"Lucretia has found you out," said Allis, presently. "You do like horses; she knows it."

"Oh, I like animals, I don't deny," Mortimer answered, "but I know very little about them--nothing about race horses."

Mike frowned and looked disparagingly at the visitor. "He must be a quare duck," he muttered to himself. That a man should know nothing of thoroughbreds was perfectly inexplicable to Gaynor. He knew many racing men whose knowledge of horseflesh was a subject for ridicule, but then they never proclaimed their ignorance, rather posed as good judges than otherwise.

But with startling inconsistency Mike explained: "There's many like ye, sir, only they don't know it, that's all; the woods is full av thim.

Would ye like to give the filly a carrot, Miss?" he added, turning to Allis. "I'll bring some."

When he returned Allis gave one to Lucretia, then they pa.s.sed to the next stall.

"That's a useful horse," explained the Trainer; "he's won some races in his 'time."

"What's his name?" asked Mortimer.

"Game Boy. He's by the Juggler. Ye remember him, don't ye?"

Mortimer was forced to confess that he didn't quite remember Juggler.

"That's strange," commented Mike, turning the big bay about with evident pride; "he won the 'Belmont,' at Jerome Park, did the ould Juggler. Ye must av heerd av that."

Mortimer compromised by admitting that he had probably forgotten it.

"Well, I haven't," declared Mike, reproachfully. "If Game Boy stands a prep this summer ye'll hear from him," he confided to Mortimer, as they left the stall. "Jist remember Game Boy; see, ye can't forget--a big bay wit' a white nigh fore leg, an' a bit rat-tailed. Yes, Game Boy's all right," monologued Mike; "but here's a better; this is Diablo. He must have tabasco in his head, fer he's got the divil's own timper. But he can gallop a bit; he can go like a quarterhorse, an' stay till the cows come home; but he's like Lauzanne acrost yonder, he's got a bee in his bonnet an' it takes a divil to ride him."