erome-ave.," says I. "There's a track out
there we can use."

On the way up Pinckney lets loose a hint or two that gives me an outline
map of his particular case. He hadn't been hittin' up any real paresis
pace, so far as I could make out. He'd just been trying to keep even
with the coupons and dividends that the old man had left him, burnin' it
as it came in, and he'd run out of matches. Guess there was a bunch of
millinery somewhere in the background too, for he was anxious about how
he'd feel around Horse-Show time. Maybe Pinckney had made his plans to
be more or less agreeable about then; but when he got a kinetoscope
picture of himself in a sanitarium he had a scare thrown into him. Next
some one gives him a tip on the Physical Culture Studio and he pikes for
Shorty McCabe.

Well, I've trained a good many kinds, but I'd never tried to pump red
corpuscles into an amateur Romeo before. There was the three-fifty,
though, and I sails in.

"Head up now, elbows in, weight on your toes, an' we're off in a bunch!"
says I. "Steady there, take it easy! This ain't no hundred-yard sprint;
this is a mile performance. There, that's better! Dog-trot it to the
three-quarters, and if your cork ain't pulled by then you can spurt
under the wire."

But Pinckney had lost all his ambition before we'd got half round. At
the finish he was breathin' more air than his wind-tanks had known in
months.

"Now for the second lap," says I.

"What? Around that fence again?" says Pinckney. "Why, I saw all there
was to see last time. Can't we try a new one?"

"Do you think mile tracks come in clusters?" says I.

"Why not just run up the road?" asks Pinckney.

"The road it is," says I.

We fixed it up that Goggles was to follow along with the goose-cart and
honk-honk the quarters to us as he read 'em on his speed-clock. We were
three miles nearer Albany when we quit, and Pinckney was leakin' like a
squeezed sponge.

"Throw her wide open and pull up at the nearest road-house," says I to
Goggles.

He found one before I'd got all the wraps on Pinckney, and in no time at
all we were under the shower. There was less of that marble-slab look
about Pinckney when he began to harness up again. He thought he could
eat a little something, too. I stood over the block while the man cut
that three-inch hunk from the top of the round, and then I made a mortal
enemy of the cook by jugglin' the broiler myself. But Pinckney did more
than nibble. After