Ira, on his feet, conscious of Humphrey’s wide-open mouth and of the four hundred and more curious gazes, moistened his lips and took a deep breath. He had acted quite on impulse, which was something he seldom did do, and he was still a bit surprised to find himself standing there facing the meeting.
“Shoot!” called someone, and many laughed.
“Mr. Chairman and—and fellows,” began Ira slowly, “I——”
“Louder!” came a demand from the back of the auditorium.
Ira made a new start, facing so that he could make himself heard at the back of the hall. [“I want to tell a story,” he said].
[“I want to tell a story,” he said]
“Naughty! Naughty!” cried a facetious youth.
Ira smiled. “It’s about a horse race. Down in Maine, where I come from, there was an old man who owned a horse.” There was a nasal twang in his voice that brought chuckles from many and smiles of anticipated amusement from more. “She wasn’t much of a horse, fellows. She was about fourteen years old, and her front knees sorter knocked together and she had the spring-halt in the left hind leg and she was blind in one eye and couldn’t see any too well outer the other. And she was fat and she was lazy because this man I’m telling about didn’t use her except to drive to the village once a week in an old rattletrap buckboard to get a pound of coffee and a sack of flour and so on. Well, one time when he was in the village he saw a notice about a trotting meeting to be held at the Fair Grounds a week or so later. So all the way home that day he talked it over with Old Bess and she switched her tail and flicked her ears and between them they decided to enter the race. So he went in to the village again and put down his entry fee and borrowed an old sulky of Peters, the blacksmith. It wasn’t a very good sulky to look at, but Peters put a new rim on one wheel and tied some baling wire around it here and there and the old man hitched it on back of the buckboard and fetched it home. And every day after that you’d see him and Old Bess jogging along the turnpike.