“Jim laughed and handed me a hundred in ten-dollar bills. ‘This shows my faith; play it for me on the farmer and the old pacer to-morrow, any way or odds you want to, and if you don’t make some yourself while you’re at it, why, it’s your own fault.’ And then he took me in the harness room and told me a little tale that made me laugh all over.
“Well, to-morrow meant there was going to be several races on the snow, and all the fashionable end of town was to be out. One or two fellows with pretty good horses had beat everything and were looking for more worlds to conquer. Just after dinner Jim put on snow goggles, a hayseed hat, the rustiest coat he could borrow, clapped that curby-legged pacer in an old sleigh that looked like it had stood up in a mouldy carriage house for fifty years, with harness to match, put a few bundles of oats, farmer like, in behind to save feed, of course, in town, and jogged on in with a sort of an ain’t-been-to-town-for-ten-years look written all over the whole turnout.
“He wasn’t looking for the first suckers he did up, though. He heard a jingling of bells behind him some two miles out, and came very near being run over by a happy lot of young fellows with their girls on a bob-sleigh, drawn by four spanking horses. The fun they had over Jim and his queer turnout was immense—for about five minutes. They dashed up beside him, asked him the price of oats, and all that and finally hollered out:
“‘Get out of the road, old man, or we’ll run over you!’
“‘But I be goin’ to town, too,’ Jim drawled out in the nasalest twang that ever came out of a down-easter’s nose. Then he shook up the old pacer just enough to stay tantalisingly in front in spite of everything they could do. The bob-sleigh crowd couldn’t go in six minutes at a trot to save their necks, so they put the teams out in full run, but that was just fun for the old pacer. They never came in twenty yards of his oats in the rear of the sleigh. After teasing the babies enough, Jim turned at the first good stretch, looked back, winked his off eye, and said: ‘Yes, chillun, I be goin’ to town, too, so good-bye to you babies, an’ heaven bless you,’ and he shot away and left them.
“You have heard of blackbirds chattering in a tree, and then all of them suddenly stop, haven’t you? The silence is painful. Well, that’s the way it was in that bob-sleigh.
“But Jim was after bigger game than that, though he couldn’t resist the temptation to have a little fun with every nobby turnout he met.
“‘Cawn’t you pass that old fellah, James,’ the male occupant of a swell rig would call out to his coachman, after Jim would wiggle along, half asleep, beside the fancy turnout.
“‘Oh, yes, your ’oner,’ James would say, and swell up in the true English style and pull at his ’ackneys and spread around blustering, and cast withering glances on the innocent looking hayseed rig. Then Jim would wake up, shake the old pacer, and leave them like Mark Twain’s coyote on the desert left the ambitious dog—a gray crack in the air and he was gone while the English coachman cussed those “low-down Hamerican ’osses” with the best mixture of Billingsgate and flunky at his command.
“But he got off the best one on two young fellows who thought they had a fast trotter. They came tearing down on Jim, intending to go by him like a flash. But just as they came up Jim shook up the old pacer, and he threw up his tail for all the world like he was frightened nearly to death, and with that wild look that made Jim afterwards declare he really believed the old rascal was onto the game himself, he would dart away, threatening to break and go all to pieces every minute. This would make the trotting fellows come faster, and Jim would make it worse by looking like he was ‘skeered’ nearly to death, and shouting out: