Maurice and the bay mare

By Henry Herbert Knibbs
Author of “The Stray,” “The Fighting Gringo,” Etc.
The true horseman, born to it and bound to it by an inbred love of the animal, admires a spirited horse. Old Maurice, the groom, in the days before he had to turn to the less-glorious branch of the game, had experienced his share of thrills with lively thoroughbreds.
Maurice the groom sidled up to me, indecision in the flicker of his bright brown eyes—indecision, which held him, with one hand raised to the level of my shoulder affectionately, as though he wished to emphasize the appeal so evident in his attitude. A quaint smile touched the corner of his mouth and vanished. A stranger might have thought Maurice timorous—Maurice, who had in his day ridden many a steeplechase in Ireland.
“Why do you take the mare out?” he said and glanced about to make sure that the other grooms could not hear him. “Why not have one of the boys give her a half hour in the ring, first? She has stood up three days, sir. I’m begging your pardon for mentioning it, but we’ve both been hurted by horses before, sir, and, you know, it ain’t like when we were younger. Why do you take the risk?”
There was a fine deference in his manner and more—a solicitude that rather astonished me.
“Then the mare is in your string?” I asked.
“They fetched her up from the lower stable three days ago,” he replied.
I had forgotten that Maurice did not know the mare well. She had but recently arrived from Tennessee, and even more recently she had been transferred to his stable.
“I wouldn’t take the risk, sir,” he reiterated in a whisper.
I was about to say, “Oh, yes, you would!” but I could hardly resort to such a cheap acknowledgment of his kindness. To have overcome his usual diffidence and made any suggestion at all, had cost him an effort, evident in the heightened color of his clean-shaven, pink cheeks. He glanced toward the grooms. A quick light shone in his brown eyes when he again looked up at me.