Boody, with a muttered curse and a savage look, laid his whip heavily over the horse's withers. The animal hesitated a moment, then sprang forward; another moment, and they had vanished round the corner in a cloud of dust.
John Tucker turned to Kitty with an apologetic air.
"I'm sorry, Miss Kitty!" he said. "I'm real sorry. I would of if I could——"
"Oh, John Tucker, don't!" Kitty was scarlet, her eyes flashing, her hands clenched. "The horrid man! Oh, I am so grateful to you, John! But how did you know?"
"Well, Miss Kitty, you see, 'twas easy enough, look at it one way. I'd seed the hoss before, seed him at his tricks, too. Yes'm: I'd seed him before, and—" a joke began to twinkle in John Tucker's eyes, and spread all over him till he became incandescent; you could have lighted a match at him; "and now I've seed him behind! haw! haw! You see me lift up his off hind foot? Well, why did I do that? Because when he shifted his footin' I see a spark of yeller. Come to look, and lo ye, his hoof was kind o' crushed in above the shoe, where he'd struck iron, and there was a flake of yellow paint on it big as my thumb nail."
"And he knew that!" Kitty was pale now, not with fear but with anger. "The scoundrel!"
"Well!" John Tucker pulled out his jack-knife and made a thoughtful incision in the door-jamb. "I dono as I'd just say that; I dono as he's a scoundrel; he's a trader! I've heard it said,—I dono as it's so, and I dono as it is—but I've heard it said that there ain't no one, not even a minister of the Gospel, a holy man, but what he'll stretch the truth just a little grain in a hoss trade."
John Tucker closed his jack-knife with a snap. "Forget it, Miss Kitty!" he said, and his tone expressed finality. "You won't have no more trouble with Slippery Ellum. He thought he'd try it on, that's all, to keep his hand in, like; tradin' is like drink to him. Hark! there's that hen again!"
"What hen, John?"
John Tucker chuckled and made a gesture of caution.