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The students from Pornell arrived early, and so did the other visitors, and by two o'clock the grounds were crowded. As before a parade was had. Then the umpire came out and gave each team fifteen minutes for practice. "We're in luck," said Dick, when Putnam Hall won the toss and took last innings. In a moment more they were in the field, and the Ump called out: "Play!"

When they were cool, he gathered them in his hand, smoothed the points, and went over to El Mahdi. The old man lifted the horse's foot, and set it on his knee, and Ump arose and stood over him. Then he shod the horse as the hunchback directed, paring the hoof and setting the nails evenly through the outer rim, clipping the nail ends, and clinching them by doubling the cut points.

Still the tale had splendid conditions precedent, and old Clabe arose to its support with many an eloquent wag of his head. I was running through this very ghost story when El Mahdi stopped in the road and pricked up his ears. At the same moment Jud and Ump pulled up beside me. Perhaps their minds were in the same channel. We listened for full a minute.

I caught at El Mahdi's mane, then I felt Jud's arm go round me, and heard Ump talking at my ear. But they were a long distance away. I heard instead the bees droning, and Ward's merry laugh, as he carried me on his shoulder a babbling youngster in a little white kilt. It was only an instant, but in it all the good days when I was little and Ward was father and mother and Providence, raced by.

Mean as his fame put him, the Black Abbot had never been known to fall in all of his vicious life. On his right knee there was a great furrow, long as a man's finger and torn at one corner. It was scarcely the sort of wound that the edge of a stone would make on a falling horse. Ump and Jud and old Jourdan examined this wound for half a night, and finally declared that the horse had been shot.

I explained it away, however, by pointing out, like a boy, not that my legs were short, but that El Mahdi, the False Prophet, was a very high horse. Jud had not dismounted, and Ump was on the Bay Eagle like a squirrel, by the time I had fairly got into the saddle. Then we started again in a long, swinging trot, El Mahdi leading, the Cardinal next, and behind him the Bay Eagle.

There was this that was peculiar about the stranger's back: that instead of being flat it presented a decided curve. "It ain't a 'ump, and it don't look like kervitcher of the spine," observed the voluble young lady to herself. "Blimy if I don't believe 'e's taking 'ome 'is washing up his back."

You want to watch out who you run with, fellows, or you're liable to turn out 'Ichneumon men' instead of gentlemen." He laughed as he returned the glass to the shelf and closed his sketch book. "What in the world!" "Pots and kettles, frying pans, French toast, hot cakes, Chef's the man; We'll wash our hair and comb our face, Camp Tech ump sa, that's the place."

The whole drove piled up in the river and began to swim in a black mass toward the north shore. I saw the Bay Eagle sweep down the bank and plunge into the river below the cattle. I could hear Ump shouting, and could see the bay mare crowding the lower line of the swimming cattle. The very light went out of the sky. We forced our horses into the river up to their shoulders, and waited.

Ump and Jud had gone to the stable and the old waggon-maker was busy with the breakfast. On the hearth a mighty cake of corn-meal was baking itself brown; potatoes roasted in the ashes, and on a little griddle about as big as a man's hat a great cut of half-dried beef was broiling.