About the street they loitered--lovers hand in hand--eating fruit and candy and drinking soda-water,or sat on the curb-stone,mothers with babies at their breasts and toddling children clinging close--all waiting for the celebration to begin.
It was a great day for the Hon.Samuel Budd.With a cheery smile and beaming goggles,he moved among his constituents,joking with yokels,saying nice things to mothers,paying gallantries to girls,and chucking babies under the chin.He felt popular and he was--so popular that he had begun to see himself with prophetic eye in a congressional seat at no distant day;and yet,withal,he was not wholly happy.
"Do you know,''he said,"them fellers I made bets with in the tournament got together this morning and decided,all of 'em,that they wouldn't let me off?Jerusalem,it's most five hundred dollars!''And,looking the picture of dismay,he told me his dilemma.
It seems that his "dark horse''was none other than the Wild Dog,who had been practising at home for this tournament for nearly a year;and now that the Wild Dog was an outlaw,he,of course,wouldn't and couldn't come to the Gap.
And said the Hon.Sam Budd:
"Them fellers says I bet I'd BRING IN a dark horse who would win this tournament,and if I don't BRING him in,I lose just the same as though I had brought him in and he hadn't won.An'I reckon they've got me.''
"I guess they have.''
"It would have been like pickin'money off a blackberry-bush,for I was goin'to let the Wild Dog have that black horse o'mine--the steadiest and fastest runner in this country--and my,how that fellow can pick off the rings!He's been a-practising for a year,and I believe he could run the point o'that spear of his through a lady's finger-ring.''
"You'd better get somebody else.''