One morning of frosty tang, that touched the pulses with its livening,
found Boone's eyes and thoughts wandering discursively from the papers
massed on his desk. His customary concentration had become a slack
force, though these were days of pressing hours and insistent minutes in
the Wallifarro offices. The reception room was crowded with waiting
figures that savoured of the motley, and this was one of the new things
brought to pass by the strange bedfellowship of politics. Yonder in a
corner sat with fidgeting restiveness a young man whose eyes, despite
his obvious youth, were mature in guile and pouched with that pasty
ugliness with which unwholesome night life trade-marks its own.
He was one of that crew imported from elsewhere to register, re-register
and vanish, but he had lingered, and now a grievance had sent him
skulking to the enemy's camp with vengeance in his heart. In an interval
of political inaction he had picked a pocket and had been locked up by a
"harness bull" who had never liked him and who chose to disregard his
present and special prerogative. In court he had been dismissed with an
admonition, it is true, but his dignity was affronted. This morning he
sat in the anteroom of Morgan Wallifarro, ready, in the inelegant but
candid parlance of his ilk, to "spit up his guts."
Not far from him sat a woman whose profession was one of the most
ancient and least revered. The vivid colouring of her lips and cheeks
shone out through thickly laid powder in ghastly simulation of a coarse
beauty long fled. "I lodged a good half-dozen of those beer-drinking
loafers, though they roistered and drove away my respectable trade--and
then the cops had the nerve to raid me," she inwardly lamented. Now she,
too, sat among the informers.
Morgan had complained that reformers always failed through their dreamy
impracticability. Now he was being as practical as the foes he sought to
overthrow. From the dribble of small leaks come the breaks that wreck
dams, and Morgan was neglecting none of them.
To Boone, whom he no longer quarantined behind a manner of aloofness, he
had confided, "We have no illusions about the courts. Their judgments
will bear the label of party, not justice; but when they turn us down I
mean to make them do it in the face of a record that will damn them
before the public."
So, together with gentlemen like General Prince and ministers of the
Gospel bearing sworn narratives of police browbeating, came the backwash
of the discontented riffraff: deserters who were willing to disclose
their secrets to appease their various resentments.
Boone, who had played simple and direct politics in the backwoods, found
himself in the midst of a more intricate version of the game--and into
it he had thrown all the weight of his energies--until this morning.
Now, as he sat gazing out over roofs and chimney-pots, a messenger boy,
impatient of anteroom delays, burst officiously into his office.
"Are you Mr. Morgan Wallifarro?" he demanded, scanning a label on the
package he bore, and, as Boone shook his head, he heard Morgan's voice
behind him: "I'm the man you're looking for."
Then as the younger Wallifarro took the package from the snub-nosed
Mercury, he opened it, revealing a gold-knobbed riding crop. Once before
that morning the young attorney had halted the all-but-congested tide of
business to telephone to a florist, and through the open door Boone had
heard the order given. Then Morgan had directed that violets and orchids
be sent that evening to Miss Anne Masters. Presumably the riding crop
was bound for the same destination.
"Anne's riding some of those Canadian hunters tonight at the Horse
Show," was Morgan's casually put remark as he felt Boone's eyes upon
him. "I thought she might like this."
It was the first time that Anne's name had passed conversationally
between them since the evening when, in that same office, Morgan's
pistol had clicked harmlessly, and upon each face fell a faint shadow of
embarrassment. Then Wellver admitted, "It's a very handsome one," and
the other passed on into his own office.
Already Boone had been thinking of those Canadian hunters. It was that
which had lured his mind away from his littered desk and filled him with
the spirit of truancy.
Tonight would see the opening of the Horse Show with the fanfare of its
brass bands and the spreading of its peacock plumes of finery.
Following upon it, as musical numbers follow an overture, would come the
dances for the debutantes, and Anne would be a debutante. In that far,
tonight would be a sort of door closing against himself as one holding
no membership in that circle whose edicts were written by Fashion. It
was, however, of another phase of the matter that his present
restiveness was born. Yesterday afternoon he had slipped into the
emptiness of the Horse Show building for an inquisitive half hour, and
had seen a hard bitten stable boy trying to rehearse a stubborn roan
over the jumps.
The heavy white bars stretching between the wings of the hurdle had
looked to him--thinking then, as now, of Anne--disquietingly formidable
and full of bone-breaking possibilities. This morning she was to
acquaint herself with her mounts. She might even now be at the hazardous
business. Suddenly Boone pushed back his papers, locked the drawer of
his desk, and took down his hat and overcoat. He was playing hookey.
Steps hurried by anxiety carried him to the building, where the great
roof was festively draped with bunting and where the smell of tanbark
came up fresh to the nostrils. A stretch of empty galleries and vacant
tiers of boxes gave an impression of roofed vastness, and he searched
the spacious arena, dotted here and there with knots of stable boys and
blanketed horses, until he caught sight of Anne.
The mount to whose saddle she was at the moment being lifted was not
reassuring to his mood. To its bit rings hung a stable boy by both
hands, and the boy's dogged set of countenance bespoke hostile distrust
for his charge, whose nostrils were distended and ember red. Boone
noted, too, as he hurried across the tanbark, that one of the animal's
eyes showed that wicked patch of white which bespeaks, for a horse, a
lawless predilection. As the girl settled herself, the beast flinched
and shivered, and the stable boy seemed about to be lifted clear of the
earth where he hung, anchoring the splendidly shaped but vicious head.
Just then Boone came up and heard a fellow, whom he took to be a
trainer, speaking near his elbow.
"There ain't no jump that will stop him. He can skim six foot like a
swallow and cop every ribbon at the show--if he's a mind to. And if he
_ain't_ got a mind to, he'll just raise merry hell and tear up the
place."
Then the groom cast loose, and the horse launched himself upward,
plunging violently and lashing out with his fore-feet.
Boone halted and caught his breath with a nervous intake. He knew that
Anne rarely and most reluctantly used a whip on a horse, and as he saw
her lash fall twice, three times, with resolute sweeps that brought out
welts upon the satin flanks, he realized that she had been warned upon
what manner of horse she was to mount. It was a brief conflict of wills,
then the red-nostrilled gelding came down to all fours and answered
amenably to rein and bit. Round the arena he swept with the rhythm of
his rapid gallop, breaking to a speedy dash as he neared the obstacles,
rising upon a flawless and seemingly winged arc that skimmed the fences
with swallow-like ease. Anne rode back flushed and triumphant, and as
Boone came up, with breathing that was still quick, he heard the trainer
voicing his commendation:
"You handled him like a professional, Miss Masters, and he takes a bit
of handling, too. There ain't many ladies I'd be willin' to put up on
him." Then the practical Canadian added, as Anne slid down and laid her
gloved hand on the steaming neck: "He's a classy-looking individual,
ain't he now? You'd never guess that I took him out of a plough, would
you?"
"Out of a plough!" echoed the girl. "Why, he's a picture horse! His
lines are almost perfect!"
The horseman nodded and grinned. "He's all of that, ma'am, but just the
same when I first saw him he was pulling a plough--or, rather, he was
trying to run away with one. Of course he must of had the breeding
somewhere way off. I reckon he's a throw-back, but if I hadn't come
along and seen him he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the
hills. As it is, he's took blues and reds all through Canada and the
East--and I've a notion you're going to ride him out the gate with a
championship tie on his brow-band tonight."
As Boone turned away with Anne, the words seemed to ring in his ears:
"If I hadn't come along and seen him, he'd still be drudging away on a
rocky farm in the hills." It fitted his own case precisely, but it made
him think, too. He wondered if the time would ever come when people
would look at him in public places and find it hard to realize that his
youth had been like that magnificent show horse's colthood--a life close
to the clods.
Nothing could have kept Boone Wellver away from the Horse Show that
evening, but he went with a self-confessed trepidation hard to conceal.
In the wide, barnlike foyer of the building, a vertigo of stage fright
obsessed him. Never had he seen such a massed and bewilderingly
colourful display of evening dress, nor heard such a confused chorus of
bright laughter, light talk and blaring orchestration. In the first
dizziness of the impression he had the sense of intruding on Fashion
vaunting itself unabashed to the trumpetings of heralds, and there swept
back over him the positive pain of diffidence which he had felt that
other time, when he stood in the open doorway of Colonel Wallifarro's
house and announced that he had come to the party.
Inside, as he forced himself onward, his disquiet increased as the blaze
of colour heightened and bloomed in the flower-like tiers of the boxes.
The glistening shoulders of women in filmy gowns, the sparkle of
jewellery, the flash of silk hats and the nodding of pretty faces, all
confused him as dry land things might confuse a fish, and he felt
unintentionally impertinent when his sleeve of decent black brushed a
soft arm white gloved to the shoulder.
Boone Wellver would have fled incontinently from that place had he not
been held there by his anxiety for Anne, which would not be allayed
until the ladies' hunters had been judged, the ribbons pinned on the
fortunate head-stalls and the exit gates swung open and closed. And the
jumping class, with its spectacular dash of danger, was held for the
last, as the climax is held for the curtain of the act.