course
and see the big race of the meeting.

Starlight slipped away in the crowd from his two friends, and managed to
get a quiet few minutes with me and Gracey and Aileen; she was scolding
him between jest and earnest for the kissing business, and said she
thought he was going to leave off these sort of attentions to other
girls.

'Not that she knew you at first, a bit in the world,' Aileen said. 'I
watched her face pretty close, and I'm sure she thought you were some
grand gentleman, a friend of the Commissioner's and the Mr. Dawsons.'

'My dearest girl,' said he, 'it was a promise I made months since that I
should attend Bella's wedding, and I never break my word, as I hope
you will find. These girls have been good friends and true to us in our
need. We all owe them much. I don't suppose we shall cross each other's
path again.'

There wasn't much more time. We both had to move off. He had just time
to catch his drag, and I had to get my horse. The Dawsons bullied him
a bit for keeping them waiting, and swore he had stayed behind to flirt
with some of the girls in the church after the wedding was over.

'You're not to be trusted when there's temptation going,' Jack Dawson
said. 'Saw you talking to that Marston girl. If you don't mind you'll
have your head knocked off. They're a rum lot to deal with, I can tell
you.'

'I must take care of myself,' he said, laughing. 'I have done so in
other lands, and I suppose yours is no exception.'

'This is a dashed queer country in some ways, and with deuced strange
people in it, too, as you'll find by the time you've had your colonial
experience,' says Bill Dawson; 'but there goes the saddling-bell!'

The course had 20,000 people on it now if there was one. About a dozen
horses stood stripped for the race, and the betting men were yelling out
the odds as we got close enough to the stand to hear them. We had a good
look at the lot. Three or four good-looking ones among them, and one or
two flyers that had got in light as usual. Rainbow was nowhere about.
Darkie was on the card, but no one seemed to know where he was or
anything about him. We expected he'd start at 20 to 1, but somehow it
leaked out that he was entered by old Jacob Benton, and that acted as
a damper on the layers of the odds. 'Old Jake's generally there or
thereabouts. If he's a duffer, it's the first one he's brought to the
post. Why don't the old varmint show up?'

This was what I heard about and roun