"You will find that everything of value I possess has been left to you. You think I have loved horses; I have loved nothing but you. I have loved you because you were worthy of it; but I should have loved you if you had not been worthy. The horses meant a good deal to me in life, but they mean nothing in death.
"I believe you will be one more great Kentucky country doctor. And whatever race you may have to run in this world, whether you win or whether you lose, I know it will be a hard, a gallant, struggle: that is all the thoroughbred can ever do. Having delivered over to you everything I own and retaining only the things I cannot will away,—my judgment, my confidence in you, and my devotion to you,—I wager these that you will win life's race and win it gloriously. My last bet—with my last coin—you will win!
"If this is good-by—good-by."
It was several weeks before he returned, bringing with him all that was earthly of one whose races were over and who himself had just been entered for the unknown stake of the Great Futurity.
Now February had reappeared, and with it came another stage of Progress. When he entered the breakfast room one morning—always to a hearty breakfast—he went first to the windows and looked out at the low dark clouds shrouding the sky and the rapidly whitening earth: it was snowing heavily. As he turned within, the bleakness out of doors brightened the fire and added its comfort to the breakfast table. While he was pouring out his coffee, suddenly through one window an object appeared; and looking out, he saw Frederick Ousley on horseback at the foot of the pavement: he was but half seen, laughing and beckoning amid the thickly falling flakes.
The doctor rushed out to the porch, and young Ousley spurred his horse up to the side of it, riding over flower-beds, trampling and ruining plants that happened not now to be in bloom. The two friends after a long crushing grip poured out their friendship with eye and speech, greeting and laughter.
Two products of that land. With much in sympathy, with no outward resemblance: one of little mingled Anglo-Saxon blood: the other of Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon strains which have created so much history wherever they have made their mortal fight. The young Kentucky Anglo-Saxon on his horse, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with heavy body and heavy limbs, a superb animal to begin with, wheresoever and in whatsoever the animal might end: the snow on the edges of his yellowish hair and close-clipped beard; around his neck, just visible inside his upturned coat collar, a light blue scarf, a woman's scarf, tied there as he had started by tender fingers that had perhaps craved the mere touching of his flesh: the scarf, as it were, of Lohengrin blue; for there was something so knightly about him, he radiated such a passion of clean young manhood, that you all but thought of him as a Kentucky Lohengrin—whom no Elsa had questioned too closely, and for whom there would never be a barren return to Montserrat.
Facing him, the young Kentucky Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon, physical equal, physical opposite: dark and swarthy soldier of the South: as he stood there giving you no notion that for him waited the crimson-dyed cup of Life's tragic brew, topped at this moment with the white dancing foam of youth and happiness.
They talked rapidly of many things. Then the object of the visit was disclosed—with an altered voice and manner:—