"You an' that otheh colt could tell me somethin' if yo' could talk," he frequently remarked.
After his conversation with Old Man Curry, Pitkin returned to his tackle-room in a savage state of mind, and, needing a target for his abuse, selected Mulligan, the Irish jockey.
Now, Mulligan was small, but he had the heart of a giant and the courage of one conviction and two acquittals on charges of assault and battery. In spite of his size—he could ride at ninety-eight pounds—Mulligan was a man in years, a man who felt that his employer had treated him like a child in money matters, and when Pitkin called him a bow-legged little thief and an Irish ape, he was putting a match to a powder magazine.
One retort led to another, and when Mulligan ran out of retorts he responded with a piece of 2 by 4 scantling which he had been saving for just such an emergency, and Pitkin lost interest in the conversation.
Mulligan left him lying on the floor of the tackle-room, and though he was in somewhat of a hurry to be gone he found time to say a few words to old Gabe, who was sunning himself at the end of the barn.
"And I don't know what you can do about it," concluded the jockey, "but anyway I've put you wise. If they ask you, just say that you don't know which way I went."
That night Old Man Curry had a visitor who entered his tackle-room, hat in hand and bowing low.
"Set down, Gabe," said the old horseman. "How's Pitkin by this time?"
"He got a headache," answered Gabe soberly.
"Humph!" snorted Curry. "Should think he would have. That boy fetched him a pretty solid lick. Glad he didn't hurt him any worse—for the boy's sake, I mean."