I fear that my mind is scarcely large enough to contain more than one idea at a time and that fact accounts for my being rather stupid when Loveday came into my room, in the small hours of that night, with a bee in her bonnet—or nightcap, rather, to be exact.
She had a large photograph in her hand; I recognized it at once as the object that she had hastily hidden under her shawl as she came out of Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon. She held her candle between the picture and my sleepy eyes.
“What does it ’pear to you to be?” she demanded.
“A horse,” I said drowsily. It was a very poor photograph. It had been taken when Hiram first started out with his new “combernation,” and it was blurred and badly finished. Beneath the photograph was printed “Prince Charley, Alf Reeder’s Great Racer.”
Had Loveday become suddenly insane, that she should arise from her bed in the dead of the night to show me with trembling eagerness, this most uninteresting photograph?
“Does it ’pear to you to be any horse you ever saw?” demanded Loveday breathlessly.
I raised myself upon my elbow and looked at her in blinking bewilderment. I had heard that it was the proper thing to humor insane people.
“I’ve seen so few race-horses, and I don’t notice them much,” I stammered. “It—it looks like a very fine horse.”
“Oh it does, does it? That’s the way it ’pears to you then.” Loveday heaved a long sigh. “Now it looks to me like one of them poor old creturs that are patched up and curry-combed and have plenty of oats give ’em, and have the whip cracked over ’em, and another horse set to runnin’ by ’em to see if they can’t get up a little spurt o’ life, with their last breath, just to put money into somebody’s pocket. I used to see such things up to the Newmarket mile-ground when I was a girl. But there! I’m an old idiot, awakin’ you up like this in the middle of the night. An idee ketched a holt of me, and when an idee ketches a holt of me between midnight and sun-up I can’t get rid of it without I tell somebody. I was kind of glad I woke up, too, for the lantern was hung out acrost the river.”
I sprang up. The lantern was the signal hung out at Uncle Horace’s when Rob was very ill and wanted Dave.