MY MARE SALLY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue IV, 27 July 1895, Page 94

MY MARE SALLY.

BY

PHILLIPS MCCLURE.

T’S a hard matter in these days to find an W&J investment for a small fortune, which will ErJS/T bring in a large income. It is a problem Ms. that has disturbed wiser heads than mine, father was a man who knew how to turn a dollar over so rapidly that it looked like two, but he spent the actual and the visionary, and left me at his death not even the secret of his trick. My mother had kindly left me a small fortune, and this, with the large collection of expensive tastes which were my father's gift, was all my equipment for life. I managed, however, to get a good deal of amusement out of the one, limited as its scope was by the confines of the other.

I had no business beyond that seeming fruitless search for a breeding place for dollars. I went about a good deal. Among the qualities that my father had given me were a love for horses, a calm judgment of horse flesh,

and the ability to ride anything. My acquaintances—and I have a good many—who indulge in stock farms, are continually asking me to stay at their places. I suppose I pay for my keep in expert knowledge. Three or four years ago Belding, whom I knew as a good fellow and a member of the Holloway Hunt Club, bought a farm down in Kentucky, and went to raising horses. He had a big old house down there, whose hallway could have accommodated a regiment, and whose bedrooms were large enough to own a perspective ; and he asked me down to spend a few weeks with him. It would take a week of interested, if not interesting talk to tell the glories of a good stock farm such as Belding had managed to fall into. He never could have originated such a splendid place. It requires about as much brains to start a good stock farm as to found a great bank. This one had been the property of an old fellow who came of generations of stock farmers, and who had added to the experience of his ancestors the latest knowledge, gained by having a hereditary open sesame to every racing stable in the world. He had died, and had been pitifully buried in the ordinary way. Instead of sacrificing his splendid stud on his grave that he might have horses in the other world, they had sacrificed the whole place in the modern way under the hammer, and Belding had bought it. The greatest tribute that I could pay to it was that I ought to have had money enough to buy it myself. But I was not so mean in friendship and spirit that I could not enjoy Belding’s luck.

There were a couple of dozen horses on the place that were remarkable, but there was a little brown mare, whose registered name was Au Revoir. but who was known to her trainers as Sally, that took my heart at once. Sally was what is known in breeding parlance as a ’sport.’ She not only utterly refused to follow her father and mother (both great in their way) and become a trotter, but she developed into a phenomenal juniper and cross country horse. Anybody would have imagined that she could claim cousinship with the Irish hunters, but she hadn't a drop of anything but pure trotting blood for at least ten generations. After I came to know Sally, I discovered that she had made up her mind that jumping and running were more fun than trotting. She could trot if she wanted to. She couldn't exactly talk, but if she were acquainted with you, and took you into her confidence, she would listen to what you had to say, and if it suited her convenience would follow your advice. I took such a great fancy to the little beast, and we became such good friends, that Belding asked me to

accept her as a gift. He said that her talents were quite useless and indeed detrimental to him, on a farm where trotting stock was raised. So Sally became my property to our mutual satisfaction.

Belding and I used to ride around in the daytime, I on my own little mare ; and we did a good deal of talking. I told him the exact state of my finances, and my desire to find some safe and permanent investment for my capital so that I could turn my attention exclusively to living, and see the sun rise daily without the obscuring clouds of carking care. The only excuse I can see for clouds is to make a good hunting morning. ‘ I’ll tell you what you want,’ Belding said, * I know a fellow-I'll ask him over to dinner to-morrow. He’s a distiller, and he knows more about whisky than old Andrew Jackson ever did. He hadn’t a cent, of money, but he learned the business from an uncle, and then built a distillery for himself. He is making money, but he wants a partner with money. Now it seems to me here is your chance. ’ ‘ But—er—a distillery !’ ‘ Why not ? Men invest their money in anything that brings them in a return. You are not going to turn distiller, any more than a man who puts his money in railroads becomes a conductor or an engineer. Besides, there are worse things than making good whisky.’ ‘ It isn't exactly the conventional employment of a gentleman.’ ‘ Well, it just is in Kentucky,’ my friend Belding remarked.

There was no use in reciting to him the arguments of the philanthropists—how if nobody made any intoxicating liquors there wouldn't be any drunkards. Belding had lived too long in Kentucky to be calm under those lectures. He would have said that there would be no railway accidents if there were no railroads. There is really nothing in this last argument, but as I have said before, Belding is not clever. Still, never saying a wise thing, he never does a foolish one. He is tremendously liked, and can bring about him just the people he chooses.

It happened that he chose to gather in a house party about this time that combined all the elements of what a house party should be. There was a gay young married lady as chaperone, her husband, three or four jolly girls, half a dozen men, and Elizabeth Harkaway. As soon as I saw Elizabeth Harkaway I knew it was what Belding was in the habit of calling ‘ all day ’ with me. She was a regular Southern beauty, with a little dark head uplifted like a deer’s, and a pair of dark, soft eyes that went all over you. There is nothing on this earth quite so ‘ fetching ’ as a genuine Kentucky beauty. She has been treated like a queen from her babyhood, has made everything masculine ‘ stand around,’ has guided horses with a light and clever hand, and every gentle yet Imperious movement shows her breeding and training. Elizabeth Harkaway was the perfect example of her type, and I fell head over ears in love with her. I had not floundered about in that state long before I discovered that I had plenty of company. Anybody might have imagined that the damsel’s eyes were electric batteries which knocked over everybody upon whom they rested. It seemed to me that I never could come near her that there were not half a dozen other fellows dangling around. I used to get on Sally and go off by myself and tell her about it. I had weathered half a dozen seasons in society, and while I had not been a prig I had never seen a girl who left life savourless when she withdrew her presence. Sally was a great deal of company. She had her little tempers to show that she was feminine, but I suppose that to me that only added to her charm. I used to pat her on the neck and ask her is she would keep a man in hot water if she were a woman.

Belding had asked the distiller as one of the house party, and I found, much to my surprise, that he was received with cordiality by everybody. He was a dry sort of man. about forty years old. but a thorough Kentuckian in all his ways. He was not only a judge of whisky but a judge of wine, and he knew more about a horse than any of us. His stories always tapered to a point, and were always told' in an original fashion that provoked the most reluctant laugh. Mine was very often of that character.

The first morning after Marshall arrived I went out on Sally to ride about the farm with Belding. I didn’t mention Marshall. His actions after dinner the night before had made me feel that I did not care to assist in any of his schemes, however profitable they might be to myself. Belding brought him into the conversation in a way which I felt was hardly in the best of taste. ‘ Marshall seems to be cutting all of us out with Miss Elizabeth, eh ?’ he said. ‘ You would hardly think a gay young beauty would take up with such a dry fellow, forty, if he's a day—but there is no accounting for a woman’s taste. And after all, there’s not one of us half so clever.’

I gave Sally a little switch with my whip, which she bitterly resented. I suppose she thought that I needn’t take it out on her, if I was out of sorts over Marshall’s attentions to Miss Harkaway. ‘ Confound Marshall !’ I said aloud. ‘ I wish you had a chance to kill him, Sally. You could do it. But I wouldn’t let him on your back for ten thousand dollars.’ That afternoon 1 asked Miss Elizabeth if she wouldn’t go out with me and try Sally. She looked on horseback as though she had never been anywhere else in her life. Her fine figure and elegant carriage were accented by her dark, close fitting habit and her spirited handling of the horse.

I rode one of Belding’s horses. I was so full of my instantaneous infatuation for Elizabeth that it was all I could do to keep from telling her about it. A fine disgust came over me at the thought of that girl caring a snap for a man who devoted his life to making whisky. Whisky ! Vulgarity of vulgarities ! I wondered how I ever could have thought of letting one penny of my

mother’s money go into such an enterprise. I looked at Elizabeth, and resented her living in a community where distillers were likely to be gentlemen. 1 knew it wasn’t polite, but we hadn’t gone a mile, and she had hardly finished exclaiming over Sally’s admirable qualities, before I, in what I thought was most tactful fashion, made some remarks which could have been constructed into a belittling of the manufacture of the State beverage. Miss Elizabeth looked at me severely. * I think,’ she said, * that almost any business is better than doing nothing at all. ’ It was a brilliant October day, and before I could reply to this crushing remark there was a halloo behind us, and the whole party came into view. They were stringing across Belding’s stone walled meadows, riding * cross country ’ for pure amusement, there being nothing to ride after.

* Let’s go with them,’ Elizabeth cried, and Sally lifted her like a bird over the next wall.

I don’t know how it happened, but in about one minute I found myself separated from her, and Marshall was by her side. The horse I was riding was no jumper, and he couldn’t be made to jump, so I had to seek easy places and gates. Then far in front of me I saw something that made my blood boil. Sally was lunging and behaving like Satan. The rest of the party had ridden on, leaving Marshall and Elizabeth together in the middle of a field. He took her down, and changing the saddles, mounted my little mare with the evident determination of giving her a lesson. I put the brute I was on at the fence between us, and dug in my spu-s. He never had jumped before, but he rose then, with a scream of terror that made me exult. To think of that man, whom I had hated the minute I saw him, riding my horse, by the side of the woman I loved ! It was beyond human endurance. .

The flight across the fields had seemingly resolved itself into a race. Marshall’s horse, which Elizabeth rode, was a capital one that he had brought with him, and Sally was fairly skimming along. They were almost up to the party, and I was not far behind. The brisk October air fairly whizzed by us, and the light turf, the famous blue grass sod, seemed to spring under the horses’ hoofs.

Every leap of my steed sent the blood faster through my veins and made me want to kill that man. But Sally knew my mind. There was a stone wall just ahead, and as I saw her approaching it, 1 knew that she was up to some mischief or other.

‘ Good little beast!’ I said to myself. * You made him take you in hand so that you could kill him !’ As Sally came to that wall she started to rise, and then, as though she had changed her mind, she settled back and sent Marshall over with terrific force. I almost heard the thud.

There was instant confusion. Everybody was down. When I reached the other side of the wall, Elizabeth Harkaway was on the ground with that man's head on her arm, wiping his face, crying that it was all her fault for having that wretched horse out, and she would never forgive herself, and she did love him, if he'd only open his eyes, and not die. Sally and I went sadly home. Even horse sense can't compass everything and she couldn’t know that that toss was going to bring matters to a crisis instead of ending them. I am still on the outlook for an investment.