On the way up Pinckney lets loose a hint or two that gives me an outline map of his particular case. He hadn't been hittin' up any real paresis pace, so far as I could make out. He'd just been trying to keep even with the coupons and dividends that the old man had left him, burnin' it as it came in, and he'd run out of matches. Guess there was a bunch of millinery somewhere in the background too, for he was anxious about how he'd feel around Horse-Show time. Maybe Pinckney had made his plans to be more or less agreeable about then; but when he got a kinetoscope picture of himself in a sanitarium he had a scare thrown into him. Next some one gives him a tip on the Physical Culture Studio and he pikes for Shorty McCabe.
Well, I've trained a good many kinds, but I'd never tried to pump red corpuscles into an amateur Romeo before. There was the three-fifty, though, and I sails in.
"Head up now, elbows in, weight on your toes, an' we're off in a bunch!" says I. "Steady there, take it easy! This ain't no hundred-yard sprint; this is a mile performance. There, that's better! Dog-trot it to the three-quarters, and if your cork ain't pulled by then you can spurt under the wire."
But Pinckney had lost all his ambition before we'd got half round. At the finish he was breathin' more air than his wind-tanks had known in months.
"Now for the second lap," says I.
"What? Around that fence again?" says Pinckney. "Why, I saw all there was to see last time. Can't we try a new one?"
"Do you think mile tracks come in clusters?" says I.
"Why not just run up the road?" asks Pinckney.
"The road it is," says I.
We fixed it up that Goggles was to follow along with the goose-cart and honk-honk the quarters to us as he read 'em on his speed-clock. We were three miles nearer Albany when we quit, and Pinckney was leakin' like a squeezed sponge.