Every one about the stalls talked of the events of the afternoon and Jim leaned against the front of one of the stalls and listened, filled with happiness. He wished the fates had made him a racing man. Then he looked at Pop Geers, the silent one, who sat for hours dumb and uncommunicative on a feed box, tapping lightly on the ground with his racing whip and chewing straw. Jim's imagination was aroused. He had once seen that other silent American, General Grant, and had been filled with admiration for him.
That was on a great day in Jim's life, the day on which he had seen Grant going to receive Lee's surrender at Appomattox. There had been a battle with the Union men pursuing the fleeing Rebs out of Richmond, and Jim, having secured a bottle of whisky, and having a chronic dislike of battles, had managed to creep away into a wood. In the distance he heard shouts and presently saw several men riding furiously down a road. It was Grant with his aides going to the place where Lee waited. They rode to the place near where Jim sat with his back against a tree and the bottle between his legs; then stopped. Then Grant decided not to take part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered with mud and his beard was ragged. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion. He was that kind of a man; he was one fitted for historic pictures and occasions. Grant wasn't. He told his aides to go on to the spot where Lee waited, told them what arrangements were to be made, then jumped his horse over a ditch and rode along a path under the trees toward the spot where Jim lay.
That was an event Jim never forgot. He was fascinated at the thought of what the day meant to Grant and by his apparent indifference. He sat silently by the tree and when Grant got off his horse and came near, walking now in the path where the sunlight sifted down through the trees, he closed his eyes. Grant came to where he sat and stopped, apparently thinking him dead. His hand reached down and took the bottle of whisky. For a moment they had something between them, Grant and Jim. They both understood that bottle of whisky. Jim thought Grant was about to drink, and opened his eyes a little. Then he closed them. The cork was out of the bottle and Grant clutched it in his hand tightly. From the distance there came a vast shout that was picked up and carried by voices far away. The wood seemed to rock with it. “It's done. The war's over,” Jim thought. Then Grant reached over and smashed the bottle against the trunk of the tree above Jim's head. A piece of the flying glass cut his cheek and blood came. He opened his eyes and looked directly into Grant's eyes. For a moment the two men stared at each other and the great shout again rolled over the country. Grant went hurriedly along the path to where he had left his horse, and mounting, rode away.
Standing in the race track looking at Geers, Jim thought of Grant. Then his mind came back to this other hero. “What a man!” he thought. “Here he goes from town to town and from race track to race track all through the spring, summer and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets excited. To win horse races is the same as winning battles. When I'm at home plowing corn on summer afternoons, this Geers is away somewhere at some track with all the people gathered about and waiting. To me it would be like being drunk all the time, but you see he isn't drunk. Whisky could make him stupid. It couldn't make him drunk. There he sits hunched up like a sleeping dog. He looks as though he cared about nothing on earth, and he'll sit like that through three-quarters of the hardest race, waiting, taking advantage of every little stretch of firm hard ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching his horse too, waiting. What a man! He works the horse into fourth place, into third, into second. The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom Butterworth, have not seen what he's doing. He sits still. By God, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he's leaning forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of himself.
“Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn't think of the people but of the horse he's driving. When the time comes, just the right time, that Geers, he lets the horse know. They are one at that moment, like Grant and I were over that bottle of whisky. Something happens between them. Something inside the man says, 'now,' and the message runs along the reins to the horse's brain. It flies down into his legs. There is a rush. The head of the horse has just worked its way out in front by inches—not too soon, nothing wasted. Ha, that Geers! Bud Doble, huh!”
On the night of Clara's marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared down the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom Butterworth, who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often fussed with a horse in a race. He had himself been like Pop Geers. All along he had known and understood the mare colt, Clara. Now she had come through; she had won the race of life.
“Ha, that old fool!” Jim whispered to himself as he rode swiftly down the dark road. When the horse ran clattering over a small wooden bridge and came to the first of the houses of the town, he felt like one coming to announce a victory, and half expected a vast shout to come out of the darkness, as it had come in the moment of Grant's victory over Lee.
Jim could not find his employer at the hotel or in Main Street, but remembered a tale he had heard whispered. Fanny Twist the milliner lived in a little frame house in Garfield Street, far out at the eastern edge of town, and he went there. He banged boldly on the door and the woman appeared. “I've got to see Tom Butterworth,” he said. “It's important. It's about his daughter. Something has happened to her.”
The door closed and presently Tom came around the corner of the house. He was furious. Jim's horse stood in the road, and he went straight to him and took hold of the bit. “What do you mean by coming here?” he asked sharply. “Who told you I was here? What business you got coming here and making a show of yourself? What's the matter of you? Are you drunk or out of your head?”
Jim got off the horse and told Tom the news. For a moment the two stood looking at each other. “Hugh McVey—Hugh McVey, by crackies, are you right, Jim?” Tom exclaimed. “No missfire, eh? She's really gone and done it? Hugh McVey, eh? By crackies!”