With a gesture, the Indian consented, received the bill, and put it with the rest. They rode to the starting post, were unceremoniously started, and Hartigan showed how much a man could do for a horse. In spite of his rider's great weight that splendid beast responded to every word, and when on the home run Hartigan used the quirt, Blazing Star seemed to know it was merely a signal, not an insulting urge, and let himself go. The Indian pony, too, was doing his utmost, but Blazing Star swept past his opponent and led at the finish by more than a length; the race was won; and Hartigan wakened up as a man out of a dream to face the awful fact that he, a minister of the gospel, had not only ridden in a horse race, but had gambled on the same.
CHAPTER XV
Pat Bylow's Spree
At the time of the incidents at Fort Ryan, Belle was away on a visit to Deadwood. Otherwise, Hartigan would surely have consulted her and profited by her calmer judgment in the matter of the race. As it was, his torturing sense of moral iniquity led him to preach a sermon in which he poured forth all the intensity of his nature. Quietly to drop the subject was not his way; he knew that every one was talking about it, so nothing would do but a public denunciation of himself, and all that followed the race track.
The text he chose was: "My wounds stink, and are corrupt, because of my foolishness" (Psalms XXXVIII:5). Jim's thought was that once the sinner is saved, all his sins become peculiarly and especially repugnant to him. They acquire nothing less than a stench in his nostrils, and henceforth are as repellent as once they were attractive, no matter what they may be; and he enumerated drunkenness, swearing, gambling, and horse-racing. At mention of the last a smile spread over the faces of the congregation. He noted it at once, and said:
"Yes, I know what you are thinking. You are wondering how I came to ride my horse in a race at Fort Ryan. Well, it was the devil laid a snare for me, and I fell in. But this I will say: I promise you I will never do the like again, and if each of you will stand up now and give me the same promise about your own particular besetting sin, then I'll feel that we have made a great gain, and I will be glad I rode that race after all."
In this land of the horse no one was long inclined to take the matter seriously. A nature so buoyant as his could not long be downcast, and Hartigan's sense of sin for his part in the race was soon put behind him. Then happened an incident that gave him a chance to score a triumph.
In a remote part of the valley some five miles back of Cedar Mountain was Bylow's Corner, a group of three or four houses near the road, the log cabins of homesteaders. These men had, indeed, few pleasures in life. Their highest notion of joy was a spree; and every month or two they would import a keg of liquor, generally of a quality unfit for human consumption. The word had been passed around that Pat Bylow had got a keg of the "real stuff," and the rest of the Corner assembled on a certain Saturday night for an orgy, which it was expected would last about two days. Word of it reached Hartigan, too, and he decided that here was a glorious opportunity to save bodies and souls at once. Without consulting any one he mounted Blazing Star, and in half an hour was at the Corner. Tying his horse to a tree, he went to the house that was the known meeting place. There were lights in the window and boisterous noises issuing forth. At the door he stopped and listened; rough voices were grumbling; there was an occasional curse, a laugh, then a woman speaking shrilly; a minute's silence, during which the sweet song of a night bird was heard in the dark bushes by the stream, whereupon a hoarse, brutalized voice shouted:
"Oh, hurry up and start that bung, you act like a schoolgirl."