ver
everything. It was besetting him from all sides. Worry was causing him
to take the lime-light from himself. He awoke to the fact that Sue was
in very poor health. If she died--He never could finish.

Taken all in all, it was a very bad time for the two oldest families
in Cottonton. Every member was suffering silently, stoically; each in
a different way. One striving to conceal from the other. And it all
centered about Garrison.

And then, one day when things were at their worst, when Garrison,
unconscious of the general misery he had engendered, had completed
Speedaway's training for the Carter, when he himself was ready for the
fight of his life, a stranger stepped off the Cottonton express and made
his way to the Desha homestead. He knew the colonel. He was a big, quiet
man--Jimmie Drake.

A week later and Drake had returned North. He had not said anything
to Garrison regarding what had called him away, but the latter vaguely
sensed that it was another attempt on the indefatigable turfman's part
to ferret out the eminent lawyer, Mr. Snark. And when Drake, on his
return, called Garrison into the club-house, Garrison went white-faced.
He had just sent Speedaway over the seven furlongs in record time, and
his heart was big with hope.

Drake never wasted ammunition in preliminary skirmishing. He told the
joke first and the story afterward.

"I've been South. Seen Colonel Desha and Major Calvert," he said
tersely.

Garrison was silent, looking at him. He tried to read fate in his
inscrutable eyes; news of some description; tried, and failed. He turned
away his head. "Tell me," he said simply. Drake eyed him and slowly came
forward and held out his large bloodshot hand.

"Billy Garrison--'Bud'--'Kid'--William C. Dagget," he said, nodding his
head.

Garrison rose with difficulty, the sweat on his face.

"William C. Dagget? Me? Me? Me?" he whispered, his head thrown forward,
his eyes narrowed, starting at Drake. "Just God, Jimmie! Don't play with
me----" He sat down abruptly covering his quivering face with his hands.

Drake laid a hand on the heaving shoulders. "There, there, kid," he
murmured gruffly, as if to a child, "don't go and blow up over it. Yes,
you're Dagget. The luckiest kid in the States, and--and the damnedest.
You've raised a muss-pile down South in Cottonton. Dagget or no Dagget,
I'm talking straight. You've been selfish, kid. You've only been
thinking of yourself; your regeneration; your pas