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Being a high-bred hackney, and the pick of the Sir Bardolph three-year-olds, he was put down as a strawberry roan. Also he was the pride of Lochlynne. "'Osses, women, and the weather, sir, ain't to be depended on; but, barrin' haccidents, that 'ere Bonfire'll fetch us a ribbon if any does, sir."
But Bonfire had blood and breeding and a pedigree which went back to Lady Alice of Burn Brae, Yorkshire. His coltdom had been a sort of hothouse existence; for Lochlynne, you know, is the toy of a Pennsylvania coal baron, who breeds hackneys, not for profit, but for the joy there is in it; just as other men grow orchids and build cup defenders.
Then did Bonfire enter upon a period of existence in which box-stalls, crested quarter blankets, rubber-tired wheels and liveried drivers had no part. It was a varied existence, filled with toil and hardship and abuse; an existence for which the coddling one gets at Lochlynne Farm is no fit preparation.
At the Lochlynne stables they turn on the steam heat in November. On rainy days you are exercised in a glass-roofed tanbark ring, and hour after hour you are handled over deep straw to improve your action. You breathe outdoor air only in high-fenced grass paddocks around which you are driven in surcingle rig by a Cockney groom imported with the pigskin saddles and British condition powders.
For three years Bonfire had been in leather and he had found the life far different from the dull routine of coddling that he had known at the Lochlynne Farm. There was little monotony about it, for the Jerrys were no stay-at-homes. Of his oak-finished stable, with its sanded floors and plaited straw stall-mats, Bonfire saw almost as little as did Mrs.
To be sure Jerry grumbled some, but inside of a quarter of an hour he had found Hawkins and paid the price; a price worthy of Sir Bardolph and quite in keeping with Lochlynne reckonings. "'E's been car sick an' show sick," said Hawkins warningly, "an' it'll be a good two weeks afore 'e's in proper condition, sir; but you'll find 'im as neat a bit of 'oss flesh as you hever owned, sir."
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