Old Lucifer! That was the horse that Uncle Horace had sold, four or five years before because, as he said, Rob was making a sentimental fuss over him. Rob had grieved so that he had brought on a fit of illness.
“That fellow will get him on to the race-course again! There are such brutes in the world! You wouldn’t believe ’twas old Lucifer when I showed you the picture on the fence. You wouldn’t have gone to the race if I hadn’t run away when I was so ill that you had to follow me. You see if Bathsheba should tell father of all that I did then—writing his name on the check and all——”
“That’s all right you know, Rob, she won’t tell!” interrupted Dave hastily. “No one shall know.”
I looked at Alice Yorke; she stood a little aside, near the river bank. Rob did not seem to observe that she was within hearing; there seemed to me a danger that what with his terror of his father and his anxiety about his old horse his mind would become permanently weakened.
As for me I felt as if the very boards had ears, instead of feeling exultant at the revelation that was proving Dave’s innocence of all the evil of which he had been accused. I had that strange sense that comes to us all sometimes that there is some one near, although invisible. I looked about me. There were many piles of boards behind which a listener might lurk; there was a clump of alders near us tall enough and thick enough to conceal an eavesdropper.
But of course it was only a nervous fancy that any one was near, so I said to myself impatiently, the next moment. I feared that my mind was growing weak like Rob’s—which would never do for a practical business woman.
“We paid Alf Reeder too much for the horse, anyway; he showed he was a cheat and then it was dangerous to let him board him, if he did say he knew just how to take care of him. Do you remember how he stumbled and fell? And how they spurred him till there was blood on his flanks? If they had made him try it once more it would have killed him! They thought so, too, or they wouldn’t have sold him. But how they made you pay! Now that you don’t hear from him I expect they’re racing him again. When my breathing gets easier so that I drop asleep I start up again thinking I see Lucifer straining his muscles and bleeding from the spur, as he was that day, and with that human agonized look that there was in his eyes when he turned them toward us!”
“You mustn’t think of it,” said Dave earnestly. “You’ll never get well while you keep brooding over it. And the horse isn’t racing now; he is taken good care of. The money has been paid regularly for his board—you couldn’t think that I would neglect that?”
I pricked up my ears. How had he paid it? I could not think how he could have come by even so small an amount of money as a horse’s board would cost.
Suddenly I met Estelle’s eyes and I knew. The old berry savings in the tin bank that were to have sent Cyrus to college had grown undisturbed; they had been added to by grandma, from time to time, as an encouragement to the childish thrift and industry. I remembered when they had been transferred from the red tin apple to the Palmyra bank, and remembered Estelle’s proud boast that there were more than forty dollars. The interest would have added a little to it in the years that had passed since then.