“And so you did! I’m not blind or deaf. I saw you and heard you as well.”
Brenchfield laughed and tapped his forehead significantly to Langford. But Langford did not respond.
“You mean, Phil, that the Mayor knows what they call ‘the horse word’?”
“He seems to possess one of them, at any rate,” replied Phil.
“So there are two of them?” laughed Jim.
“There ought to be, if there are any at all;––just as 96 there is hot and cold, day and night, right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative.”
“That sounds reasonable enough, too,” answered Jim, who turned suddenly to Brenchfield as the latter was frantically endeavouring to quiet the plunging Beelzebub.
“Now then, for the land’s sake, Graham Brenchfield Lavengro, why don’t you use that other word? What’s the good of creating a devil if you can’t keep the curb on him?”
Brenchfield commenced to belabour the horse in his irritation, but the more he struck the more nervous and vicious she seemed to grow.
The sight set Phil’s thoughts awandering. A little door in his brain opened and he remembered the queer little wizened-faced horse rustler in for life at Ukalla Jail, whom he had befriended and who in return had given him a word which he said might be useful some day, as it was guaranteed to quiet the wildest horses. At the time, he had grinned at it in his incredulity, but now the thought came, “What if there might be something in it?”