“I did it for the best,” said Sam with humble simplicity. “I wanted you to have a good pony and a cheap pony, and not to be bothered thinking if it was fit for a clergyman’s household or not, and I did it all for the best. But I made a mistake. I ought to have been more straighterer.”
“Is there anything else”—Andy paused for a word—“unusual about the animal?”
Sam scratched his chin and replied with reluctance—
“Well—there’s just one thing—he waltzes when he hears a band. Only there never is a band.”
“I should like to know,” said Andy, rising and standing in a dignified attitude with a hand on a book, “what you got out of this transaction?”
Then Sam threw himself, as it were, upon Andy’s mercy, and looked his master straight in the eye, with an honesty indescribable.
“I’ll be straight with you,” he said. “The man offered me half a crown, and I took it.”
He omitted to mention the other seventeen and six, because he felt that was between himself and the landlord of the Blue Tiger, where much of it had been expended, but he did, after a great deal of fumbling in a dingy pocket, produce a half-crown.
“Here it is,” he said in a voice charged with manly feeling. “You take it, sir. It justly belongs to you.”
“I don’t want your half-crown,” said Andy hastily.