ad been
in the box yonder wit' Diablo, he wouldn't a-felt so funny."

"Mortimer behaved well; didn't he, Mike?" asked Porter.

"Behaved well; is it? He was like a live divil; punched thim two big
stallions till they took water an' backed out. My word! whin first I
see him come to the stable wit' Miss Allis, thinks I, here's wan av
thim city chumps; he made me tired. An' whin he talked about Lauzanne's
knees, m'aning his hocks, I had to hide me head in a grain bag. But if
ye'd seen him handle that fork, bastin' the Black, ye'd a thought it was
single sticks he was at, wit' a thousand dollars fer a knock-out."

"One can't always tell how a colt will shape, can they, Mike?" spoke
Porter, for Mike's fanciful description was almost bringing a smile to
Mrs. Porter's troubled face.

"Ye can't, sor, an' yer next the trut' there. I've seen a herrin'-gutted
weed av a two-year-old--I remember wan now; he was a Lexington. It
was at Saratoga; an' bot' t'umbs! he just made hacks av iverythin' in
soight--spread-eagled his field. Ye wouldn't a-give two dollars fer him,
an' he come out an' cleaned up the Troy Stake, like the great horse he
was."

"And you think Mortimer has turned out something like that; eh, Mike?"

"Well, fer a man that knows no more av horses than I know av the
strology av stars, he's a hot wan, an' that's the God's trut'."

Mortimer's gallant act had roused the Irishman's admiration. He would
have done as much himself, but that would have been expected of a
horseman, constantly encountering danger; that an office man, to be
pitied in his ignorance, should have fearlessly entered the stall with
the fighting stallions was quite a different matter.

Even Allis, with her more highly developed sense of character
analyzation, felt something of this same influence. She had needed some
such manifestation of Mortimer's integral force, and this had come with
romantic intensity in the tragic box-stall scene. This drama of the
stable had aroused no polished rhetoric; Mortimer's declamation had been
unconventional in the extreme. "Back, you devils!" he had rendered with
explosive fierceness, oblivious of everything but that he must save the
girl. The words still rang in the ears of Allis, and also the echo
of her own cry when in peril, "Mortimer!" There must have been a
foreshadowing in her soul of the man's reliability, though she knew it
not.

Even without the doctor's orders, it was patent that Mortimer must
remain