“I should have thought that Loveday would have suppressed the horn,” Octavia remarked.
But Loveday looked proud and happy, perched beside Hiram upon the resplendent wagon.
But Hiram came not with a cracking of his whip and at a lively speed, as usual, but with a slowness that made us fear that something was the matter. Dave lingered to greet them, although he would have to run to be in time for the boat.
“We have come slow ’count of this poor old cretur!” explained Loveday from afar, in her high, shrill tones. “He’s most beat out.”
And now we saw, hitched to the back of the wagon, a poor old horse, whose head hung dejectedly, and whose ribs could be counted.
“You’ve got him!” cried Dave, and dropped his traveling-bag and his overcoat in the garden path.
“Well, I never calc’lated to come without him, though one time I didn’t know as we should fetch anything but his body,” said Loveday. “That man, Alf Reeder, had gone clear’n off to Canady and left the horse on his brother’s old, wore out farm, where there wa’n’t a bite for a grasshopper. There he was pocketin’ the money for his keep and poor old Lucifer a-starvin’! But there! what can you expect of them bettin’ kind of folks that’s used to livin’ on what’s other folks’ loss?”
“I never ought to have trusted him,” said Dave, self-reproachfully. “But he seemed so fair, and I paid him a good price.”
Dave was stroking Lucifer with tender hands, and the old horse looked at him with an almost human gaze.
“I don’t know as we should ever ’a’ got him if it hadn’t been for a young man that said he was a friend of all of you, though I never heard tell of him in my born days—Mr. Edward Carruthers; he give me his card. We fell in with him at a hotel, and first off I thought he was teched, he was so crazy to help find Alf Reeder. And if it didn’t turn out that that was what he’d come for himself—to find the old horse!