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Jim Silver had only seen the Waler mare once on the occasion of her famous victory and defeat at Aintree the previous year; but once seen Mocassin was never forgotten. She came along at that swift, pattering walk of hers, her nose in the air, and ears twitching. "Always the same," whispered Ginger. "In a terrible hurry to get there."
Jaggers, with the air of the Grand Inquisitor, appeared on the platform with his head-lad, Rushton. The trainer entered into talk with a man whom Albert informed his mistress was a cop in plain clothes. "Place swarms with 'em," the youth whispered. "And Ikey's Own. They're takin' no chances." In fact, Mocassin and her two stable-companions were travelling on the same train as the Putnam horse.
The evening ended, as the Liverpool Herald reported, at two in the morning, when Abe Gideon, the bark-blocks comedian, was hoisted on to the table and sang the Mocassin Song to a chorus that set the water in the docks rocking. The Sefton Arms Old Mat never stopped in Liverpool for the big race.
It carried the name and fame of Mocassin to thousands of pious homes in which horses and racing had been anathema in the past, so that Ministers from Salem and Quaker ladies from Philadelphia could tell you over tea cups sotto voce something of the romantic story of the mare from the Cumberland. And that was not all.
Suddenly, however, a change passed over his features. The mocassin of the officer had evidently attracted his attention, and he now demanded, in a more serious and imperative tone, "Ha! what means this disguise? Who is the wretch whom I have slain, mistaking him for a nobler victim; and how comes it that an officer of the English garrison appears here in the garb of a servant?
Had he retained his unbending boot, it must have crushed whatever it pressed; whereas, the pliant mocassin, yielding to the obstacles it encountered, enabled him to pass noiselessly over them.
Francisco, from the Valparaiso and China traders; his leg from the ankle to the hip is covered by a pair of leggings of deer-skin, dyed red or black with some vegetable acids, and sewed with human hair, which hangs flowing, or in tresses, on the outward side; these leggings are fastened a little above the foot by other metal bracelets, while the foot is encased in an elegantly finished mocassin, often edged with small beautiful round crimson shells, no bigger than a pea, and found among the fossil remains of the country.
"Just as long as you've a mind to let it, and no longer," answered a man clad in the garb of a trapper, whose mocassin foot had given no indication of his approach until he was within a couple of paces of the door. "Is that you, Joe?" said Jack, looking up, and pointing to a log which served as a seat on the other side of the doorway. "It's all that's of me," replied Joe.
The rest of the party, who had lain down, laughed at this sally, and Stiff, on consideration, thought it best to laugh too. In a few minutes every one in the encampment was sound asleep, with the exception of Robin Gore, who took the first hour of watching, and who sat beside the sinking fire like a Indian in earnest meditation, with his eyes resting dreamily on the worn-out mocassin.
For the Saturday before the trial gallop had brought Mat Woodburn a letter from Miller, the station-clerk at Arunvale, which was the station for Dewhurst. The station-clerk had a feud of many years' standing with Jaggers, and had moreover substantial reasons of his own for not wishing Mocassin to win at Aintree.
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