Part 4

"Broughton saw the bone, and in a moment it was his turn to frighten me. He squealed like a hare caught in a trap. He screamed and screamed till Mrs. Broughton, almost as terrified as I, held on to him and coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But Broughton--and as he moved I thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as terribly ill as he did--thrust her from him, and scrambled out of the bed on to the floor, and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said nothing. This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He rose from the floor with the bone in his hand, and stood silent. He seemed to be listening. 'Time, time, perhaps,' he muttered, and almost at the same moment fell at full length on the carpet, cutting his head against the fender. The bone flew from his hand and came to rest near the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and broken, with blood over his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, 'Listen, listen!' We listened.

"After ten seconds' utter quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could not be sure, but at last there was no doubt. There was a quiet sound as of one moving along the passage. Little regular steps came towards us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to where his wife sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into his shoulder.

"Then the last thing that I could see as he turned the light out, he fell forward with his own head pressed into the pillow of the bed. Something in their company, something in their cowardice, helped me, and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was outlined fairly clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand and touched Mrs. Broughton's shoulder in the darkness. But at the last moment I too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed. Only, we all heard. The footsteps came to the door, and there they stopped. The piece of bone was lying a yard inside the door. There was a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing was in the room. Mrs. Broughton was silent: I could hear Broughton's voice praying, muffled in the pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying away. In a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. There at the end of the corridor was a small bowed figure in a gray veil--I knew it only too well. But this time there was a pathos in the drooped head that left me standing with my forehead bowed in shame against the jamb of the door.

"'You can turn the light on,' I said, and there was an answering flare. There was no bone at my feet. Mrs. Broughton had fainted. Broughton was almost useless, and it took me ten minutes to bring her to. Broughton only said one thing worth remembering. For the most part he went on muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that he had said that thing. He said in a colorless voice, half as a question, half as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'

"We spent the remainder of the night together. Mrs. Broughton actually fell off into a kind of sleep before dawn, but she suffered so horribly in her dreams that I shook her into consciousness again. Never was dawn so long in coming. Three or four times Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs. Broughton would then just tighten her hold on his arm, but she could say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew worse as the hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions had battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of my life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding up my hand with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped me and I helped them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that night. At last, when the light came in pretty strongly, and the birds outside were chattering and singing, we felt that we must do something. Yet we never moved. You might have thought that we should particularly dislike being found as we were by the servants: yet nothing of the kind mattered a straw, and an overpowering listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton's man, actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton, speaking hardly and stiffly, said: 'Chapman, you can come back in five minutes.' Chapman was a discreet man, but it would have made no difference if he had carried his news to the 'room' at once.

"We looked at each other and I said I must go back. I meant to wait outside till Chapman returned. I simply dared not re-enter my bedroom alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he would come with me. Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five minutes if the blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.

"So Broughton and I, leaning stiffly one against the other, went down to my room. By the morning light that filtered past the blinds we could see our way, and I released the blinds. There was nothing wrong in the room from end to end, except smears of my own blood on the bed, on the sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the thing to pieces."

Colvin had finished his story. There was nothing to say. Seven bells stuttered out from the fo'c'sle, and the answering cry wailed through the darkness. I took him downstairs.

"Of course I am much better now, but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin."

THE TERROR

BY A. E. THOMAS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HERMAN C. WALL

It was a gray and bitter morning in January when Tim first saw The Vale. For weeks winter had lain heavy upon the sunny South. A cold rain had swept the countryside; then came zero weather for days, till the ice lay inch-thick on all the broad pikes of Lexington County, and only the firs were green.

Tim and his mother had left the little cabin they called home at the first crack of dawn and together had tramped the five miles that spelled the road to The Vale. All the way they spoke scarce a word, for they knew that parting was near and that it had to be. Colonel Darnton was to take the boy and make a jockey of him, if he could, and the stables of The Vale were to be his home thereafter.

The negroes were feeding the stallions when the boy and his mother trudged up to the big barn. They sat on a feed-box until the Colonel had finished his breakfast and come out from the big house under the trees.

"Morning to you, Mrs. Doolin," said the Colonel. "And so you've brought the boy, eh?"

"I have that," responded Mrs. Doolin, in her odd mixture of brogue and Southern drawl. "An' I beg ye t' be good tew him. Since Pete died, he's all I hov, an' it's the good lad he's been to me, an' phwat it is I'll be doin' widout him whin he's gawn, I dinnaw. Will ye be afther lettin' him come down t' see me wanst a fortnight, sor?"

"Of course I will," smiled the Colonel, and then he turned to Tim, standing there, so pale and little.

"And you, boy," he said, taking the lad's chin in his big hand and turning the blue eyes up to his gaze, "how about you--strong for the hosses, eh?"

Tim's lip quivered. He was only twelve. But he looked the Colonel bravely in the face.

"I reck'n," he said.

"Well, well, we'll see," said the Colonel, mercifully releasing the boy's chin. "'Twould be odd if you weren't. Your father was mighty handy with 'em all--mighty handy."

"Savin' yer prisince, Colonel, I'd hov jist wan wurrud wid th' boy," said the woman, and she drew Tim aside.

"Lookee yew here, yew Tim Doolin," she said, when she had him by himself, "don't yew niver fergit thet yew're up here tew The Vale tew larn hosses. Raymimber thet." The boy drew one ragged sleeve across his blue eyes.

"All right, maw," he quavered.

"An' raymimber this, too," she went on. "There niver yit was wan Doolin thet wasn't on the square. Hoss racin' ain't prayin', an' all them as races hosses ain't like the Colonel. But there niver was wan Doolin yit thet wasn't on the level. Mind yew ain't the fust crook in the clan, er else yew needn't niver come home t' the Blue Grass ter look yewr maw in the face."

Thin and gaunt and gray-haired, she stood in the biting wind that fought to tear her shawl from her bony shoulders. For a moment she stared, stern and dry-eyed, at the boy. Somehow he had never seemed so tiny before.

"Will yew raymimber thet?" she demanded at last. Tim dropped his eyes in boyish embarrassment.

"I reck'n," he said.

His mother drew her shawl tightly about her shoulders and departed without more ado.

The life of a stable-boy on a great breeding-farm is not all beer and skittles, whatever that may be. His principal business is to look sharp and do as he is told and never forget. It's always early to rise, before dawn in the winter time, and often late to bed, if some of the priceless thoroughbreds are ailing. Moreover, the tongues of stable foremen are sharp, and their hands are heavy.

Tim made his mistakes. Once, after they came to trust him at The Vale, on a sharp morning when he was giving King Faraway, the head of the stud, his morning gallop on the pike, he fell to dreaming. A little brook ran under a wooden bridge built for carriage use. But to one side there was a ford through which people drove in summer to give their horses drink. The brook was solid ice that morning, but Tim, not thinking, turned King Faraway into the ford. The great horse slipped and fell.

Tim sprang up from the far side of the brook with the blood gushing from a nasty cut on his forehead. But he didn't think of that. Was King Faraway hurt?

He walked the three miles back to The Vale, the stallion limping behind him, and at the stable he told the truth and got a thrashing.

King Faraway was on three legs for a month. But he recovered. Every night of that month the boy slept on a heap of straw in the stallion's box stall, waking up half a dozen times a night to rub the injured stifle; and in the end the great horse was as good as new.

Again, one chilly November night Tim left one of his yearlings out in the South Paddock. Late that night a cold, driving storm came up. In the morning they found the yearling shivering by the paddock gate. The Colonel himself worked his fingers off over that yearling colt, for he was bred in the purple. The youngster had pneumonia, but they saved him, and the Colonel said that Tim's nursing was what pulled him through.

On an April morning something over two years after the day Tim came to The Vale, he started with the season's two-year-olds for the big tracks at New York. He had helped break the youngsters to the saddle and to the track on the half-mile race-course on the farm, and he knew every one of the lot as if he had been its mother. So when they rounded them up to take them to the special box-cars that were waiting in the freight yards, the Colonel took the lad aside.

"Really want to be a jockey, Tim?" he asked.

"Sure," said Tim.

"Want to leave us, then, eh?" The boy looked away, and the Colonel spared him.

"All right," he said with a laugh. "To the races you go. You can come back if you don't like it."

All the broad acres of The Vale and the costly stallions and the brood mares belonged to David Holland, a captain of finance. He was too busy manipulating the ticker to pay much attention to the stock-farm itself. He knew nothing whatever about the breeding of horses and was clever enough to admit it. He paid the bills and got his fun out of "seeing 'em run."

The Holland stable was already quartered at Sheepshead Bay when the Colonel and Tim arrived with the two-year-olds. Pat Faulkner, the trainer, was there to meet them. He and the Colonel drew aside and left the boy to himself. The hours for morning gallops were long since over, and when Tim climbed the white rail fence that enclosed the back-stretch, the big and beautiful track was absolutely deserted.

"Well," said Faulkner, "what sort of a grist have you brought me this trip? I've been bitin' me nails off to find out, but not a word would you write."

They had out the chestnut colt with the one white foot, and the black with the white blaze, and the bay filly by Checkers-Flighty, and a few other individuals, while the trainer felt them over and looked them up and down and round about, and had them walked and trotted and cantered through the stable yard.

When it was all over, and he knew that here was material that would make his rivals sit up, Faulkner's eyes fell upon a slim shape sitting on the white rail fence.

"What's the kid?" he demanded.

"That?" said the Colonel, with a smile, "why, that's Tim Doolin, a champion jockey I've brought you." The trainer grunted.

"How old?" he asked.

"Going on fifteen, weighs seventy-three pounds, is kind and clever, knows the hosses, and they'll do for him. Try him out at exercise work, and if he makes good, give him a chance to ride."

That same night the Colonel departed.

After that Tim's work was cut out for him. There were twenty-six two-year-olds in the Holland stables, twelve three-year-olds, and six or eight thoroughbreds in the aged division. Faulkner kept a big staff of grooms and exercise boys, but there was always a day's work for each of them. Aside from the routine exercise for every horse in training, the feeding, the grooming, and so on, all the youngsters had to be broken to the starting barrier. Some trainers didn't pay much attention to that.

"Let 'em come to it in their races," said they. Not so, Faulkner. He drilled every last one of his two-year-olds till the starting gate was no more to them than so much steel and wood and webbing.

Tim was not long in winning the trainer's confidence. The job of breaking to the barrier was turned over to the stable foreman, under whose eyes the grooms and exercise boys worked. But one afternoon Faulkner himself came out to see how things were going. He noticed that the three two-year-olds that were Tim's especial care were already barrier-broken. He cross-examined the lad. Tim was reticent.

"I--I--jest get 'em used to it," he faltered.

"How?" demanded the trainer.

"I--I jest lead 'em up to it, first along, an' let 'em smell of it and look at it. Then I git one of the boys to spring it while I'm a-standin' by at their heads. They git used to it pretty soon. Then I ride 'em up to it."

"Humph!" grunted the trainer; but later he said to the foreman: "That kid's got sense."

It wasn't long before Tim was exercising three-year-olds, and one gray morning when he turned out of the loft where he slept, the foreman shouted:

"Hurry up, you Tim, an' git yer breakfast."

The boy wondered and obeyed. He gulped down the last of his oatmeal, shot out of the training kitchen, and ran up to the stables, where a negro groom was holding a big bay horse, about which Faulkner himself was busily working. The trainer arose as the boy ran up.

"Up you go, kid," he said and tossed Tim into the saddle.

And Tim knew that he was to exercise Lear! And everybody knew that the Holland stable was pointing Lear for the Brooklyn Handicap! It was a proud moment for Tim. But his honors didn't sit too heavily on his small shoulders, for Faulkner was a hard task-master.

"Jog him to the mile post and send him the last half in .55 an' keep yer eye on the flag," the trainer would order.

Then the boy would canter away through the gray light, and the trainer, handkerchief in one hand and stop-watch in the other, would mount the fence. If the clock said .57 for that last half mile, or anything between that and .55, there was a slap on the back and a "Good kid," for Tim, but woe to him if the clicking hand cut it down to .53.

Mistakes he made, and many of them, but they grew fewer and fewer. Good hands he had (for they are born with a boy, if he's ever to have them) and an intuitive knowledge of the temper of a horse. A good seat they had taught him at The Vale. And gradually, little by little and bit by bit, he came to be what only one jockey in fifty ever grows into--an unerring judge of pace.

Just what it is that tells a boy whether the muscles of steel that he bestrides are shooting him rhythmically over a furlong of dull brown earth or black and slimy mud in .12-1/2 or .13-1/4, some person may perhaps be able to tell, but certain it is that no person ever has told it. Long after Tim had learned the secret as few boys have ever known it, I asked him.

"Why," said he, "yew know your hoss, an' after thet, why, yew jest feel it."

It was not until the autumn meeting at Gravesend that Tim first wore the colors. It was in an overnight selling race for two-year-olds, for which Faulkner had in despair named Gracious.

Gracious was a merry little short-bodied filly, who was bred as well as any of the Holland lot, but who hadn't done well. Out of six starts she had never shown anything, and Faulkner had determined to start her once more and then weed her out. The weight, eighty-seven pounds, was so light that the stable jockey couldn't make it. Then Faulkner remembered the Colonel's words: "Give him a chance, if he makes good."

"I'll do it," he said, and told Tim.

Tim didn't sleep well that night, and with wide eyes he welcomed the first light of the great day. At last he was to wear the colors!

"Just get her off well and take your time," said Faulkner, as he put the boy up. "Rate her along to the stretch and then drive her."

Tim did all that. Coming into the stretch, there were four horses ahead of him on the rail. But two of them were weakening. Then Tim called on the filly. She answered and went up. But the colt next her was staggering. He swerved, and Tim had to pull out. He got Gracious going again and landed her third, only a head behind the second horse. Faulkner was radiant as Tim dismounted.

"Good kid," he said. He had backed the filly a bit to run third. But Tim was almost weeping.

"I could have won," he moaned, "if thet there Blinger hed kep' straight."

The boy rode half a dozen races in the next month, all of them for two-year-olds. He won once and was second twice. Among the other apprentice riders he was already a personage, although, of course, he scarcely dared speak to the full-fledged jockeys.

And then the Terror came.

It was Gracious that brought it. There were eight two-years-olds in the seven-furlong sprint on the main track at Morris Park. The filly had gone slightly off her feed the night before the race, but she seemed perfectly fit otherwise, and Faulkner determined to start her.

"She won't finish as strong as she would a week ago," he told the boy, as the saddling bugle blew. "So you send her along a bit at the start and get the rail. Keep her goin' an' let her die in front."

"I reck'n," said Tim confidently, and they swung him into the saddle.

Gracious, under Tim's riding, was a quick breaker. She leaped away the instant the barrier rose, and from the middle of the track the boy took her to the rail before the run up the back-stretch was over. She held her lead till the field had rounded into the stretch, and then he felt her falter. In an instant he began to ride, first with hands, then with hands and feet, then with hands and feet and whip. But it was not in the filly to answer. At the six-furlong pole she had gone stale--gone stale between two jumps. But the boy kept at her with might and main.

It was useless. In six strides a brown muzzle crept up to his saddle girth. In two jumps more it reached the filly's shoulder. In three more strides the two were head and head; and then the brown muzzle was in front.

Suddenly the brown muzzle drooped, and the colt faltered. Tim took heart again. Perhaps, perhaps he might still nurse the filly home in front. He gripped her withers a bit tighter with his knees and spoke to her, softly and pleadingly, as was his wont, through his clenched teeth:

"Come on, yew gal--come on, yew baby--come jes' once mo'--jes' once--we's mos' home now--come--come. Come, yew gal!"

Back to the boy's stirrup came the saddle girth of the brown colt, as his stride shortened under the staggering drive. Tim's heart leaped in his bosom, for there was the wire not ten jumps away and--he was going to win.

"Come--come, yew baby," he whispered almost into the filly's ear, as he leaned far over her nodding head. The ecstasy of victory thrilled his small body to his very toes.

At that instant the brown colt swerved against him. The pungent odor of sweating horseflesh smote his nostrils--the roar of a horrified crowd filled his ears--the track rose up to meet him. A flash of red enveloped his brain--then came darkness and oblivion.

When he came to himself, the first faint light of dawn was sifting in through a window somewhere. "Time I was up fer exercisin'," he thought, and he struggled to rise. A flash of pain in his left arm turned him faint and sick. As he wondered over this, he became aware of a dull, steady roar that filled the room.

Again he opened his eyes. Dimly he made out the form of a white-capped woman standing over him. Then he knew that he was not lying in the loft at Sheepshead Bay.

"Are you awake, little boy?" said a soft voice.

"I--I reck'n," said Tim faintly.

There came the rattle of a heavy vehicle pounding over pavements, the shrill shriek of a whistle, the roar of horses' hoofs.

Then he remembered it all and turned his face to the wall.

That same evening Faulkner came in to see him.

"Well, Tim," he said, "'twas a bad tumble, hey? How d'you feel? better?"

"Sure," said the boy feebly.

"That's fine, that's fine," cried the trainer heartily. "'Twa'n't your fault. You done fine. You'd 'a' won, sure, 'f that chump Reilly had kep' his colt straight. But don't you care. We'll have you out in a few days, the Doc says. I telegraphed the Colonel you was all to the good, an' he'll tell yer ma, so don't you worry about that, kid." He leaned over, smiled kindly, and put a huge hand on the boy's head.

It smelled horribly of sweaty horseflesh. With a shudder Tim turned his head away.

"You musn't mind a little thing like a tumble," said the trainer anxiously. "They all get 'em. Why, I remember when I was ridin' a hoss named ----"

And the kindly horseman blundered on in an attempt to cheer the helpless lad. It seemed to Tim that he simply must cry out to him to stop, when the nurse came swiftly up and warned the trainer not to stay any longer.

"Well, so long, kid," was Faulkner's parting word. "Oh, 'course yer busted arm won't let yer ride again this fall, but the season's most over anyway. Only two more days o' Morris Park, and y' know we ain't got any cheap ones to start at Aqueduct. Anythin' I kin do f' you?" Tim opened his eyes again.

"Filly hurted?" he asked faintly.

The trainer laughed.

"Nothin' to hurt," he said. "Skinned her knees a bit, but I was goin' to put her out o' trainin' anyhow. She's O.K."

To Tim's unspeakable relief he lumbered away.

With his arm in a sling, Tim was out again at the end of a week. Much against the boy's will, Faulkner took him one day to the meeting at Aqueduct. There the trainer was soon surrounded by professional colleagues, and Tim fled to a seat in the highest row of the grandstand. Thence he looked down upon the first stages of a six-furlong sprint, but when three horses labored home in a tight-fit finish he buried his face in his hands that he might not see them.

When he lifted his face again, he glanced furtively about, thankful, oh, so thankful, that nobody had noticed him.

Then self-scorn descended upon him. If he could only go away somewhere and die! Furtively, he wept, wiping the tears away with one pudgy, brown fist. For some minutes he stared, heavy-eyed and broken, at his feet.

"Ta-ra-ta-ta-ta! Ta-ra-ta-ta!"

The bugle spoke, calling the handicap horses to the post.