"If I live to be a hundred and break the bank at Monte Carlo three times a
week," said Mallory, shaking his head reminiscently, "I could not know a
tenth part of the frantic excitement of that race or of the mad triumph
when our horse won. Gran'ther cast his hat upon the ground, screaming like
a steam-calliope with exultation as the sorrel swept past the judges'
stand ahead of all the others, and I jumped up and down in an agony of
delight which was almost more than my little body could hold.

"After that we went away, feeling that the world could hold nothing more
glorious. It was five o'clock and we decided to start back. We paid for
Peggy's dinner out of the dollar we had won on the race--I say 'we,' for
by that time we were welded into one organism--and we still had a dollar
and a quarter left. 'While ye're about it, always go the whole hog!' said
gran'ther and we spent twenty minutes in laying out that money in trinkets
for all the folks at home. Then, dusty, penniless, laden with bundles, we
bestowed our exhausted bodies and our uplifted hearts in the old
buckboard, and turned Peg's head toward the mountains. We did not talk
much during that drive, and though I thought at the time only of the
carnival of joy we had left, I can now recall every detail of the
trip--how the sun sank behind Indian Mountain, a peak I had known before
only through distant views; then, as we journeyed on, how the stars came
out above Hemlock Mountain--our own home mountain behind our house, and
later, how the fireflies filled the darkening meadows along the river
below us, so that we seemed to be floating between the steady stars of
heaven and their dancing, twinkling reflection in the valley.

"Gran'ther's dauntless spirit still surrounded me. I put out of mind
doubts of our reception at home, and lost myself in delightful ruminatings
on the splendors of the day. At first, every once in a while, gran'ther
made a brief remark, such as, ''Twas the hind-quarters of the sorrel I bet