Jim was duly penitent.
Travis let them out a link. They flew down a soft, cool graveled stretch. He drew them in at the sound of an ominous click. It came from Sadie B.
“Sadie B.'s forging again. Didn't I tell you to have the blacksmith move her hind shoes back a little?”
“I did, sir,” said Jim.
“You've got no weight on her front feet, then,” said Travis critically.
“Not to-night, sir—I took off the two ounces thinking you'd not speed them to-night, sir.”
“You never know when I'm going to speed them. The night is as good as the day when I want a tonic.”
They had reached the big stone posts which marked the boundary of Westmoreland. A little farther on the mares wheeled into the gate, for it was open and lay, half on the ground, hanging by one hinge. It had not been painted for years. The driveway, too, had been neglected. The old home, beautiful even in its decay, sat in a fine beech grove on the slope of a hill. A wide veranda, with marble flag-stones as a base, ran across the front. Eight Corinthian pillars sentineled it, resting on a marble base which seemed to spring up out of the flag-stones themselves, and towering to the projecting entablature above.
On one side an ell could be seen, covered with ivy. On the other the roof of a hot-house, with the glass broken out.
It touched even Richard Travis—this decay. He had known the place in the days of its glory before its proprietor, Colonel Theodore Westmore, broken by the war, in spirit and in pocket, had sent a bullet into his brain and ended the bitter fight with debt. Since then, no one but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following the plough himself.