ccustomed to such little
amenities as friendly pats from men, and the comradeship of his
fellow-workers, it was like a bad dream. He was not even cheered by the
fact that his leg, intelligently treated by the stable-boss, was growing
better. What did that matter? Had he not lost his caste? Express and
dray horses, the very ones that had once scurried into side streets at
sound of his hoofs, now insolently crowded him to the curb. When he had
been on the truck Silver had yielded the right of way to none, he had
held his head high; now he dodged and waited, he wore a blind bridle,
and he wished neither to see nor to be seen.

For three months Silver had pulled that hateful refuse chariot about the
streets, thankful only that he traversed a section of the city new to
him. Then one day he was sent out with a new driver whose route lay
along familiar ways. The thing Silver dreaded, that which he had long
feared, did not happen for more than a week after the change.

It came early one morning. He had been backed up in front of a big
office-building where a dozen bulky cans cumbered the sidewalk. The
driver was just lifting one of them to the tail-board when, from far
down the street, there reached Silver's ears a well-known sound. Nearer
it swept, louder and louder it swelled. The old gray lifted his lowered
head in spite of his determination not to look. The driver, too, poised
the can on the cart-edge, and waited, gazing.

In a moment the noise and its cause were opposite. Old Silver hardly
needed to glance before knowing the truth. It was his old company, the
Gray Horse Truck. There was his old driver, there were his old team
mates. In a flash there passed from Silver's mind all memory of his
humble condition, his wretched state. Tossing his head and giving his
tail a swish, he leaped toward the apparatus, neatly upsetting the
filled ash-can over the head and shoulders of the bewildered driver.

By a supreme effort Silver dropped into the old lope. A dozen bounds
took him abreast the nigh horse, and, in spite of Lannigan's shouts,
there he stuck, littering the newly swept pavement most disgracefully at
every jump. Thus strangely accompanied, the Gray Horse Truck thundered
up Broadway for ten blocks, and when it stopped, before a building in
which a careless watchman's lantern had set off the automatic, Old
Silver was part of the procession.

It was Lannigan who, in the midst of an eloquent flow of indignant
abuse, mad