“We might send him to the post, but that's all the good it'll do us, I'm feared.”
“I've seen him do a great gallop,” contended Allis.
“He did it for you, but he won't do it for nobody else. There ain't no boy ridin' can make him go fast enough for a live funeral. But we'll start him, an' I'll speak to Redpath about takin' the mount.”
Allis was thinking very fast; her head, with its great wealth of black hair, drooped low in heavy meditation.
“Don't engage him just yet, Dixon,” she said, looking up suddenly, the shadow of a new resolve in her gray eyes; “I'll talk it over with you when we go back to the house. I'm thinking of something, but I don't want to speak of it just now--let me think it over a little.”
Dixon was deep in thought, too, as he went back to his own stables. “We haven't got a million to one chance,” he was muttering; “the money's burned up, an' the race is dead to the world, as far as we're concerned.”
That Allis could evolve any plan to lift them out of their Slough of Despond he felt was quite impossible; but at any rate he got a distinct shock when, a little later, a slight-formed girl, with gray eyes, set large and full in a dark face, declared to him that she was going to ride Lauzanne in the Derby herself.
“My God, Miss!” the Trainer exclaimed, “you can't do it. What would people say--what would your mother say?”
“People will say the race was well ridden if I'm any judge, and mother won't be interested enough to know whether Lucretia was hitched to a buggy in the Derby or not.”
“But the Judge would never allow a girl--”
“There'll be no girl in it;”. and Allis explained, in minute detail the result of her deep cogitation.
“It won't work; you never could do it,” objected Dixon, with despondent conviction. “That big head of hair would give you dead away.”
“The head of hair won't be in evidence; it will be lying in my trunk, waiting to be made up into a wig after we've won.”
“No, no; it won't do,” the Trainer reiterated; “everybody'd know you, an' there'd be a fine shindy. I believe you could ride the horse right enough, an' if he has a chance on earth you'd get it out of him. But give up the idea, everybody'd know you.”
The girl pleaded, but Dixon was obdurate. He did not contend for an instant that she was not capable of riding the horse,--only in a race with many jockeys she would find it different from riding a trial gallop,--but his main objection was that she'd be known. Allis closed the discussion by saying that she was going home to encourage her father a little over the mare's defeat in the Handicap, and made Dixon promise not to engage Redpath for Lauzanne till her return next morning.