“But,” said Boniface, a short, fat man, made without any apparent neck at all—only head and shoulders like a codfish—“but the rascal did not pay me for the last time he put up his old beast here, and I’ll keep it now till I am paid or till it dies, which latter event will probably happen first to such a bag of bones.”
“You can’t do that, old boy,” said Mr. B., delightedly.
“He is right again,” I replied. “If you let a guest take away his horse, unless, indeed, he merely takes it out for exercise, day by day, animo revertendi,[332] it amounts to giving him credit and a relinquishment of your right of lien, so that you can’t afterwards retake it. And even if the man was to come back and run up another account for the keep of his horse, although you might detain it for the latter debt, you could not for the former.”[333]
“But have I no lien upon the horse of a guest? Besides, I did not let him take it away. He went off with it at daybreak, before any one was up, the villain,” said mine host, waxing more and more wrathy as the thought of past grievances recurred to him.
“He, he, he!” laughed B. “You might have retaken it if you had been spry enough, and then you might have kept it; but now it’s too late, too late, too late, as the song says.”[334]
“Exactly so,” I added. “Of course, my dear sir, there is little doubt but what you have a right to detain a horse, brought to you by a traveler, for its keep.[335] And if you kept that old nag you would have a perfect right to continue to charge for the food supplied from day to day, while it remained in your possession, and that although Mr. B. distinctly told you that he would not be responsible for anything supplied to his horse; because otherwise your security would soon be reduced to the value of an old hide and bones.[336] But then cui bono?”
“What’s that?” asked the astonished innkeeper.
“I mean, what would you gain by the additional outlay of good fodder?” I explained.
“Why, I would make the old thing work!” replied the man.
“No, indeed!” said Blackstone. “You would have no right to ride on my horse, or use him for your own benefit in any way.”[337]