Johnny Ludlow, Second Series

by Mrs. Henry Wood

“Tod, there’s Captain Bird.”

“Captain Bird! Where? You are always fancying things, Johnny.”

“A few yards lower down. Close to the cords.”

“Oh, be shot to the scoundrel, and so it is! What a swell! Don’t bother. Here they come.”

“Blue cap wins!” “No! red sleeves gains on him!” “Yellow stripes is first!” “Pink jacket has it!” “By Jove! the bay colt is distanced!” “Purple wins by a neck!”

With a hubbub of these different versions from the bystanders echoing on our ears, the horses flew past in a rush and a whirl. Black cap and white jacket was the winner.

Amidst the crowding and the pushing and the excitement that ensued, I tried to get nearer to Captain Bird. Not to see him: it was impossible to look at him with any patience and contrast his dashing appearance with that of poor, faded Lucy’s: but to see the other man. For he put me in mind of the gentleman-detective Eccles, who had loomed upon us at Crabb Cot that Sunday afternoon in the past winter, polished off the sirloin of beef, crammed the Squire with anecdotes of his college life, and finally made off with the other earring.

You can turn back to the paper called “Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings,” and recall the circumstances. How she lost an earring out of her ear: a pink topaz encircled with diamonds. It was supposed a tramp had picked it up; and the Squire went about it to the police at Worcester. On the following Sunday a gentleman called introducing himself as Mr. Eccles, a private detective, and asking to look at the other earring. The Squire was marvellously taken with him, ordered in the beef, not long gone out from the dinner, and was as eager to entrust the earring to him as he was to take it. That Eccles had been a gentleman once—at least, that he had mixed with gentlemen, was easy to be seen: and perhaps had also been an Oxford man, as he asserted; but he was certainly a swindler now. He carried off the earring; and we had never seen him, or it, from that day to this. But I did think I saw him now on the racecourse. In the side face, and the tall, well-shaped figure of the top-booted country gentleman, with the heavy bunch of seals hanging from his watch-chain, who leaned on that man Captain Bird’s arm, there was a great resemblance to him. The other earring, lost first, was found in the garden under a small fir-tree when the snow melted away, where it must have dropped unseen from Mrs. Todhetley’s ear, as she stopped in the path to shake the snow from the tree.

But the rush of people sweeping by was too great. Captain Bird and he were nowhere to be seen. In the confusion also I lost Tod and Harry Parker. The country gentleman I meant to find if I could, and went looking about for him.

The carriages were coming away from their standing-places near the ropes to drive about the course, as was the custom in those days. Such a thing as taking the horses out of a carriage and letting it stay where it was until the end of the day was not known on Worcester racecourse. You might count the carriages-and-four there then, their inmates exchanging greetings with each other in passing, as they drove to and fro. It was a sight to see the noblemen’s turn-outs; the glittering harness, the array of servants in their sumptuous liveries; for they came in style to the races. The meeting on the course was the chief local event of the year, when all the county assembled to see each other and look their best.