made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me--
a horse-race heaven on earth. There you have the state of my mind in
those days, the kind of man I was."

Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
bore him down. He was terribly, exhaustingly alive. Something possessed
him, and he possessed his hearers.

"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away from
the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
to be for me. The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
came, a melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two
thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."

"Oh! Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
her hands wringing. "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.

A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
reminiscence fled from his eyes. "Yes, you are right, little friend," he
said. "That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing
his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as