“It wouldn't matter if I waited till the resurrection. I can't change myself. I'm not Garrison. Faith of a gentleman, I'm not. Honestly, Sue.” He laughed a little nervously.
Again her gray eyes searched his. She sighed. “Of course I take your word.”
She fumbled in her bosom and brought forth a piece of paper, carefully smoothing out its crumpled surface. Without a word she handed it to Garrison, and he spread it out on his filly's mane. It was a photograph of a jockey--Billy Garrison. The face was more youthful, care-free. Otherwise it was a fair likeness.
“You'll admit it looks somewhat like you,” said Sue, with great dryness.
Garrison studied it long and carefully. “Yes--I do,” he murmured, in a perplexed tone. “A double. Funny, isn't it? Where did you get it?” She laughed a little, flushing.
“I was silly enough to think you were one and the same, and that you wished to conceal your identity from your relatives. So I made occasion to steal it from the book your aunt was about to read. Remember? It was the leaf she thought the major had abstracted.”
“I must thank you for your kindness, even though it went astray. May I have it?”
“Ye-es. And you are sure you are not the original?”
“I haven't the slightest recollection of being Billy Garrison,” reiterated Billy Garrison, wearily and truthfully.
The ride home was mostly one of silence. Both were thinking. As they came within sight of Calvert House the girl turned to him:
“There is one thing you can do--ride. Like glory. Where did you more than learn?”
“What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood,” she quoted enigmatically. She was smiling in a way that made Garrison vaguely uncomfortable.
Alone in his room that night Garrison endeavored to focus the stray thoughts, suspicions that the day's events had set running through his brain. All Sue Desha had said, and had meant without saying, had been photographed on the sensitized plate of his memory--that plate on which the negatives of the past were but filmy shadows. Now, of them all, the same Garrison was on the sky-line of his imagination.
Could it be possible that Billy Garrison and he were one and the same? And then that incident of the train. Surely he had heard it before, somewhere in the misty long ago. It seemed, too, as if it had occurred coincidently with the moment he had first looked into those gray eyes. He laughed nervously to himself.
