play.

What villains there were in the world, the girl thought; for a man to
lay them odds against their horse, knowing that she had been poisoned,
was a hundred times worse than stealing the money from their Dockets.

"I don't suppose we'll ever be able to prove it," declared Dixon,
regretfully; "but that doesn't matter so much as the mare being done
for; we're out of it now good and strong. If we'd known it two days ago
we might a-saved the money, but we've burned up a thousand."

"We'll have to start Lauzanne," said Allis, taking a brave pull at
herself, and speaking with decision.

"We might send him to the post, but that's all the good it'll do us, I'm
feared."

"I've seen him do a great gallop," contended Allis.

"He did it for you, but he won't do it for nobody else. There ain't no
boy ridin' can make him go fast enough for a live funeral. But we'll
start him, an' I'll speak to Redpath about takin' the mount."

Allis was thinking very fast; her head, with its great wealth of black
hair, drooped low in heavy meditation.

"Don't engage him just yet, Dixon," she said, looking up suddenly, the
shadow of a new resolve in her gray eyes; "I'll talk it over with you
when we go back to the house. I'm thinking of something, but I don't
want to speak of it just now--let me think it over a little."

Dixon was deep in thought, too, as he went back to his own stables. "We
haven't got a million to one chance," he was muttering; "the money's
burned up, an' the race is dead to the world, as far as we're
concerned."

That Allis could evolve any plan to lift them out of their Slough of
Despond he felt was quite impossible; but at any rate he got a distinct
shock when, a little later, a slight-formed girl, with gray eyes, set
large and full in a dark face, declared to him that she was going to
ride Lauzanne in the Derby herself.

"My God, Miss!" the Trainer exclaimed, "you can't do it. What would
people say--what would your mother say?"

"People will say the race was well ridden if I'm any judge, and mother
won't be interested enough to know whether Lucretia was hitched to a
buggy in the Derby or not."

"But the Judge would never allow a girl--"

"There'll be no girl in it;". and Allis explained, in minute detail the
result of her deep cogitation.

"It won't work; you never could do it," objected Dixon, with despondent
conviction. "That big head of hair would give you dead away."

"The head of hair won't be in e