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The third summons reached him: he stopped, hesitated, made comic gesticulations with his stick in the air then began to retrace his steps. The effort of walking and calling after him, had turned Mat's thoughts in another direction.
"I don't know," Beverly replied, with a yawn, "but I'm thinking that after we see all the folks, and play with Mat's little boys awhile, and eat Aunty Boone's good stuff till we begin to get flabby-cheeked and soft-muscled, and our jaws crack from smiling so much when we just naturally want to get out and cuss somebody about that time I'll be ready to run away, if I have to turn Dog Indian to do it."
It was on the tip of Mat's tongue to emulate the communicativeness of young Thorpe, and to speak unreservedly of what he had seen in the drawer of the bureau but he suddenly restrained the words just as they were dropping from his lips.
Although Mat's gallant rescue of "Columbus" had warmly predisposed Valentine in his favor, the painter was too conscientious to soften facts on that account, when he told Zack's mother where her son was now living, and what sort of companion he had chosen to lodge with. Mrs.
But they were not to be outdone; a new plan was laid, and in the course of the next week a dozen of the most enterprising and intrepid of the "boys," mounted each upon a good horse, went to Mat's new residence for the express purpose of securing him.
But it was now impossible to rest, after what had been already discovered, without beginning, in one direction or another, the attempt to find out Arthur Carr. Mat's purpose of doing this sprang from the strongest of all resolutions a vindictive resolution.
"One of the has-beens, I should say." Goosey Gander Boy Woodburn came leading the winner through the cheering crowd. It was Old Mat's horse, Old Mat's race; and they had all got a bit on.
"Mat's got her wish at last," I said, as we sat with Uncle Esmond after dinner under a big maple tree and looked out at the far yellow Missouri, churning its spring floods to foam against the snags along its high-water bound. "What's Mat's wish?" Uncle Esmond asked. "To have a good home and stay there. She wished that one night, years ago back in old Fort Bent.
The Spring Meeting at Polefax was always Old Mat's day out. And it was part of the accepted order of things that he should come to the Meeting driving in his American buggy behind the horse with which later in the day he meant to win the Hunters' Steeplechase. There were very few sporting men who remembered the day when Mat had not been a leading figure in the racing world.
It was a new and somewhat surprising light on the character of Old Mat, but the Duke accepted it without demur. "She's right," he said at the club at Lewes. "Mat's a rogue, but he's not a wrong 'un." And with his unequalled experience of both classes, the old peer had every right to speak.
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