hat he had no crime to
hide. It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he was a
horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him when they
wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush." And he
added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."

Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet;
though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble.
There was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more
than all else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived
his life for over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer,
and stud-manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the
opinion of the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of
occupation unless they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.

"Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
farming.

"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He's an artist, that man is.
Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley. "I'd like to
get at the bottom of him. There's a real good story under his asbestos
vest--something that'd make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I
do now."

After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
continued the gossip. "Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in
England--and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see;
and there he is feelin' the hocks of a filly or openin' the jaws of a
stud horse, age-hunting! Why, you needn't tell me--I've had my mind made
up ever since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan's Inniskillen
chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just sort of
appeared out of the mist of the marnin', t