“He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him, every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly, nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.
“It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me. Yet he did not hate me. He loved me... as much as it is possible for a horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”
“But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”
“That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But why am I wanted urgently?”
“Planchette.”
“Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it when it was all the rage long ago.”
“So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite phantom, it seems.”
“A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s magnetism.”
“Positively uncanny... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She gives me the creeps.”
“Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never has the creeps. It gives the creeps. That’s its function. Where did you people pick her up, anyway?”