Puzzle of the Red Stallion Read Free

finality. “Go on, Snowflake, get busy with the pitchfork. You got work to do.”
    “So has you!” Highpockets retorted. But he moved disjointedly away toward the stalls shaking his head. Latigo Wells remained at the door letting his cigarette ash fall from unheeding fingers.
    As the hoofs of the big red thoroughbred rang out upon deserted Central Park West a man in a tight dark overcoat moved back into the shadows of a doorway, but Violet Feverel did not notice him. She was looking beyond the park gateway to see the glimmering of dawn in the sky above the towers of Fifth Avenue. She drew a deep breath of the damp sweet air and held it.
    As they went up the slope into the park Siwash bent his heavy-sculptured neck and touched a velvet muzzle to his mistress’s leg, leaving a wet mark on the jodhpur cord. He whinnied softly, remembering mornings like this in earlier and better days, when at Saratoga and Hialeah and Churchill Downs he had been breezed gloriously around the track with only stableboys and handicappers to watch, and with a monkey-like little man perched on his withers and crooning soft encouragements in his ear.
    Siwash liked the soft feel of the mud underhoof. He tossed his head, wishing as always that the woman who straddled him would lighten the pull of the curb on his mouth. There was something about mud that always made Siwash want to go. During his four years as a race horse it had always been on a slow track with better horses floundering and slipping all around him that he had chalked up his victories. It was against mud that the power in those muscled red shoulders really came into play and the long trim legs thrust hardest.
    He broke into an easy canter as his rider leaned forward and gave him a fraction more of the rein. Siwash was a horse who liked to get there—anywhere. Being only a horse he had no premonition of the strange destination toward which he bore his lovely but heavy-handed mistress this morning.
    It seemed warm for this sunrise hour. Violet Feverel pulled the stock from her throat, trying to let her body swing easily with the rolling gait of the big thoroughbred. But she still held the curb hard against his mouth. Siwash knew, as horses always know, that his rider was afraid.
    Across the green reaches of the park, beyond the towers of the Avenue, the sky was reddening with the sunrise. Violet Feverel remembered something from her childhood, a line she had once read in an old almanac—“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning….”
    Then, almost as if she heard the beat of invisible hoofs on the path behind her, she shivered and urged the big horse forward, so that they went galloping northward through the wet loneliness of the deserted path beneath the blind shuttered windows of the great apartment houses of Central Park West, as if in a wild effort to escape. But it was only herself that Violet Feverel wanted to leave behind that morning.
    So horse and rider went northward at a full gallop, to keep an appointment in Samarra.
    The sun was still well behind the towers of the Avenue when through the doorway of an old brownstone house on West Seventy-fourth Street emerged a small and bouncing terrier of the wire-haired clan. His nose was a black pin-seal button surrounded by shaggy whiskers which gave him an air of waggish respectability—an air belied by the twinkle in the hot brown eyes which peered through at the world. His shaggy white paws scrabbled over the doormat as the terrier sought to fling himself headlong down the steps to the sidewalk.
    At the other end of a bright green leather lead he dragged a prim-looking schoolteacher of uncertain age and certain temperament, who wore at the moment a look of mingled sleepiness and resignation.
    “Relax, you restless brute!” chided Miss Hildegarde Withers as the little dog led her in irregular and undignified plunges down the street. She shook her head and her blue eyes twinkled. “It seems to me, Dempsey lad, that there ought