s entirely unexpected. It was
the cavernous and melancholy head of an incredibly thin, old, whitish
horse. This head waggled slowly from side to side; the nostrils
vibrated; the mouth opened, and the hollow cough sounded again.

Recovering themselves, Penrod and Sam underwent the customary human
reaction from alarm to indignation.

"What you want, you ole horse, you?" Penrod shouted. "Don't you come
coughin' around ME!"

And Sam, seizing a stick, hurled it at the intruder.

"Get out o' here!" he roared.

The aged horse nervously withdrew his head, turned tail, and made a
rickety flight up the alley, while Sam and Penrod, perfectly obedient
to inherited impulse, ran out into the drizzle and uproariously pursued.
They were but automatons of instinct, meaning no evil. Certainly they
did not know the singular and pathetic history of the old horse who
wandered into the alley and ventured to look through the open door.

This horse, about twice the age of either Penrod or Sam, had lived
to find himself in a unique position. He was nude, possessing neither
harness nor halter; all he had was a name, Whitey, and he would have
answered to it by a slight change of expression if any one had thus
properly addressed him. So forlorn was Whitey's case, he was actually an
independent horse; he had not even an owner. For two days and a half he
had been his own master.

Previous to that period he had been the property of one Abalene Morris,
a person of colour, who would have explained himself as engaged in
the hauling business. On the contrary, the hauling business was an
insignificant side line with Mr. Morris, for he had long ago given
himself, as utterly as fortune permitted, to the talent that early in
youth he had recognized as the greatest of all those surging in his
bosom. In his waking thoughts and in his dreams, in health and in
sickness, Abalene Morris was the dashing and emotional practitioner
of an art probably more than Roman in antiquity. Abalene was a
crap-shooter. The hauling business was a disguise.

A concentration of events had brought it about that, at one and the
same time, Abalene, after a dazzling run of the dice, found the hauling
business an actual danger to the preservation of his liberty. He won
seventeen dollars and sixty cents, and within the hour found himself
in trouble with an officer of the Humane Society on account of an
altercation with Whitey. Abalene had been offered four dollars for
Whitey so