soon pulled his animal in and permitted the ugly thing to pass him, so
as to enjoy a back view of her. That sealed his fate. The course had
been marked off in a circle of two miles in circumference and some
twenty feet wide, the limits plainly defined by little furrows. Before
the animals had gone a half mile both had been permitted to settle down
into a comfortable walk, in which they continued three-fourths of the
way round the ring. Then the Englishman thought it time to whip up and
canter in.

But he didn't. As he came up alongside the "Lightning Express," as the
crowd had begun to call her, that creature turned her head diagonally
backward and let fall a smile. The encroaching beast stopped as if he
had been shot! His rider plied whip, and forced him again forward upon
the track of the equine hag, but with the same result.

The Englishman was now alarmed; he struggled manfully with rein and whip
and shout, amidst the tremendous cheering and inextinguishable laughter
of the crowd, to force his animal past, now on this side, now on that,
but it would not do. Prompted by the fiend in the concavity of her back,
the unthinkable quadruped dropped her grins right and left with such
seasonable accuracy that again and again the competing beast was struck
"all of a heap" just at the moment of seeming success. And, finally,
when by a tremendous spurt his rider endeavored to thrust him by, within
half a dozen lengths of the winning post, the incarnate nightmare turned
squarely about and fixed upon him a portentous stare--delivering at the
same time a grimace of such prodigious ghastliness that the poor
thoroughbred, with an almost human scream of terror, wheeled about, and
tore away to the rear with the speed of the wind, leaving the colonel an
easy winner in twenty minutes and ten seconds.