ong as
possible and then one day, while the apple fakir was standing on the
back step of the cart shouting things at a woman who was leaning half
way out of a fourth-story window, he bolted. He distributed that load of
apples over four blocks, much to the profit of the street children, and
he wrecked the wagon on a hydrant. For this the fakir beat him with a
piece of the wreckage until a blue-coated officer threatened to arrest
him. Next day Skipper was sold again.

Skipper looked over his new owner without joy. The man was evil of face.
His long whiskers and hair were unkempt and sun-bleached, like the tip
end of a pastured cow's tail. His clothes were greasy. His voice was
like the grunt of a pig. Skipper wondered to what use this man would put
him. He feared the worst.

Far up through the city the man took him and out on a broad avenue where
there were many open spaces, most of them fenced in by huge bill-boards.
Behind one of these sign-plastered barriers Skipper found his new home.
The bottom of the lot was more than twenty feet below the street-level.
In the centre of a waste of rocks, ash-heaps, and dead weeds tottered a
group of shanties, strangely made of odds and ends. The walls were
partly of mud-chinked rocks and partly of wood. The roofs were patched
with strips of rusty tin held in place by stones.

Into one of these shanties, just tall enough for Skipper to enter and no
more, the horse that had been the pride of the mounted park police was
driven with a kick as a greeting. Skipper noted first that there was no
feed-box and no hayrack. Then he saw, or rather felt--for the only light
came through cracks in the walls--that there was no floor. His nostrils
told him that the drainage was bad. Skipper sighed as he thought of the
clean, sweet straw which Reddy used to change in his stall every night.

But when you have a lump on your leg--a lump that throbs, throbs, throbs
with pain, whether you stand still or lie down--you do not think much on
other things.

Supper was late in coming to Skipper that night. He was almost starved
when it was served. And such a supper! What do you think? Hay? Yes, but
marsh hay; the dry, tasteless stuff they use for bedding in cheap
stables. A ton of it wouldn't make a pound of good flesh. Oats? Not a
sign of an oat! But with the hay there were a few potato-peelings.
Skipper nosed them out and nibbled the marsh hay. The rest he pawed back
under him, for the whole had been thr