At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears In Lute’s eyes as they met his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.
“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”
“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”
“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not even your unconscious hand.”
“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.
“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.
The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.
“How do you do it?”
“Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears, sir. And where the lines cross—”
“That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at: the second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”
******
“Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since dinner. You are wanted immediately.”
Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its glowing; fire.
“You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.
Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it to Uncle Robert tomorrow.”
“But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause, slipping her hand into his.
“He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him, every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly, nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.
“It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me. Yet he did not hate me. He loved me … as much as it is possible for a horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”
“But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”
“That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But why am I wanted urgently?”
“Planchette.”
“Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it when it was all the rage long ago.”
“So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite phantom, it seems.”
“A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s magnetism.”
“Positively uncanny … at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She gives me the creeps.”
“Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never has the creeps. It gives the. That’s its function. Where did you people pick her up, anyway?”
“I don’t know—yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I think—oh, I don’t know. At any rate, Mrs. Grantly came to California, and of course had to visit Aunt Mildred. You know the open house we keep.
They halted where a passageway between two great redwood trunks gave entrance to the dining room. Above, through lacing boughs, could be seen the stars. Candles lighted the tree-columned space. About the table, examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris’s gaze roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused for a moment on Lute’s Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray temples belied the youthful solidity of his face.
“Who’s that?” Chris whispered.
“A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That’s why you didn’t see him at dinner. He’s only a capitalist—water- power-long-distance-electricity-transmitter, or something like that.”
“Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”
“He can’t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it and hire other men’s brains. He is very conservative.”
