“Yes, sir!” called Sam, running.
“Look here,” said Andy, pointing to the patches that were now cream-colour. “What’s that?”
“Struck with lightning!” cried Sam dramatically. “Well! it’s a mercy it wasn’t you, sir. That’s all I can say. But shock will turn hair white in animals as well as people. I remember my poor old aunt had a white patch over her left ear ever after the roof fell in one stormy night.”
Andy looked at his henchman. “Come to me in the house in half an hour,” was all he said.
But Sam knew that this was one of his rare failures.
About half an hour later the Vicar sat in dry clothes, drinking hot tea, and awaiting the culprit. He was irritated, chilled through, and as like the senior curate as he had ever been in his life.
“I gather,” he remarked when Sam appeared, “that you were aware of the—er—tinting of the animal?”
Sam faced him as one honest man another.
“I won’t deny I were aware,” he said. “I won’t deny it. I’d seen the pony before the owner knowed the likely customer was a clergyman, and after. But he told me on his sacred oath that the stuff he’d put on was permanent. ‘Stand the little beggar under a tap for a year, and it won’t wash off,’ was his very words. And I thought what a man doesn’t know he can’t grieve about, so I kept it to myself. I was sure, being a clergyman with a quiet taste, that you’d rather not know he was so circussy underneath. And he was dirt cheap. Piebald or plain, he was dirt cheap.”
“I know that,” said Andy, “but what I object to is the dishonest dissimulation—yes, I can call it nothing else, dishonest dissimulation on your part.”