a pedigree
which went back to Lady Alice of Burn Brae, Yorkshire.

His coltdom had been a sort of hothouse existence; for Lochlynne, you
know, is the toy of a Pennsylvania coal baron, who breeds hackneys, not
for profit, but for the joy there is in it; just as other men grow
orchids and build cup defenders. At the Lochlynne stables they turn on
the steam heat in November. On rainy days you are exercised in a
glass-roofed tanbark ring, and hour after hour you are handled over
deep straw to improve your action. You breathe outdoor air only in
high-fenced grass paddocks around which you are driven in surcingle rig
by a Cockney groom imported with the pigskin saddles and British
condition powders. From the day your name is written in the stud-book
until you leave, you have balanced feed, all-wool blankets,
fly-nettings, and coddling that never ceases. Yet this is the method
that rounds you into perfect hackney form.

All this had been done for Bonfire and with apparent success, but a few
hours of railroad travel had left him with a set of nerves as tensely
strung as those of a high-school girl on graduation-day. That is why a
draught of cold air had chilled him to the bone; that is why, after
reaching the Garden, he had gone as limp as a cut rose at a ball.

II

Hawkins, who had jumped into his clothes and hurried to the scene from a
nearby hotel, behaved disappointingly. He cursed no one, he did not even
kick a stable boy. He just peeled to his undershirt and went to work. He
stripped blankets and hood from the wretched Bonfire, grabbed a bunch of
straw in either hand and began to rub. It was no chamois polishing. It
was a raking, scraping, rib-bending rub, applied with all the force in
Hawkins's sinewy arms. It sent the sluggish blood pounding through
every artery of Bonfire's congested system and it made the perspiration
ooze from the red face of Hawkins.

At the end of forty minutes' work Bonfire half believed he had been
skinned alive. But he had stopped trembling and he held up his head.
Next he saw Hawkins shaking something in a thick, long-necked bottle.
Suddenly two grooms held Bonfire's jaws apart while Hawkins poured a
liquid down his throat. It was fiery stuff that seemed to burn its way,
and its immediate effect was to revive Bonfire's appetite.

Hour after hour Hawkins worked and watched the son of Sir Bardolph, and
when the get-ready bell sounded he remarked:

"Now, blarst you, we'll see if you're