g word, glaring fiercely and twisting his white mustache and
imperial with a very martial air, he seated himself majestically by his
daughter.

Garrison recognized him. He was Colonel Desha, of Kentucky, whose horse,
Rogue, had won the Carter Handicap through Garrison's poor riding of the
favorite, Sis. His daughter was expostulating with him, trying to insert
the true version of the affair between her father's peppery exclamations
of "Occupying my seat!" "I saw him raise his hat to you!" "How dare he?"
"Complain to the management against these outrageous flirts!" "Abominable
manners!" etc., etc.

Meanwhile Garrison had silently walked into the smoker. He tried to
dismiss the incident from his mind, but it stuck; stuck as did the
girl's eyes.

At the next station a newsboy entered the car. Garrison idly bought a
paper. It was full of the Carter Handicap, giving both Crimmins' and
Waterbury's version of the affair. Public opinion, it seemed, was with
them. They had protested the race. It had been thrown, and Garrison's
dishonor now was national.

There was a column of double-leaded type on the first page, run in
after the making up of the paper's body, and Garrison's bitter eyes
negligently scanned it. But at the first word he straightened up as if
an electric shock had passed through him.

"Favorite for the Carter Handicap Poisoned," was the great, staring
title. The details were meager; brutally meager. They were to the effect
that some one had gained access to the Waterbury stable and had fed Sis
strychnine.

Garrison crumpled up the paper and buried his face in his hands, making
no pretense of hiding his misery. She had been more than a horse to him;
she had been everything.

"Sis--Sis," he whispered over and over again, the tears burning to his
eyes, his throat choking: "I didn't get a chance to square the deal.
Sis--Sis it was good-by--good-by forever."

CHAPTER III.

BEGINNING A NEW LIFE.

On arriving at the Thirty-fourth Street ferry Garrison idly boarded a
Forty-second Street car, drifting aimlessly with the main body of Long
Island passengers going westward to disintegrate, scatter like
the fragments of a bursting bomb, at Broadway. A vague sense of
proprietorship, the kiss of home, momentarily smoothed out the wrinkles
in his soul as the lights of the Great White Way beamed down a welcome
upon him. Then it was slowly borne in on him that, though with the
crowd, he was not of it. His mother, t