Saratoga Trunk (28 page)

For a moment the midget was still, still. His lips drew back from his teeth like those of an animal about to sink his fangs into an enemy. Then he looked up pitifully into Maroon’s stern face. “You going to make me?”

“Surest thing you know.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

Maroon made a threatening gesture.

“Here!” squealed Cupide. From the inside hidden pocket of his tight little jacket he took a tiny folded packet like a powder paper; from the lining of his hat he took another; he took a stubby pencil from some inner recess of his clothing, unscrewed its top and brought forth a vial hardly thicker than a darning needle. “Here. Take them. This is only a powder, it makes a horse sneeze and his eyes water, it does no harm—after the race. This makes him chill. And cough. This, under the hoof, you can’t even find it once it’s in, but—”

Maroon turned him inside out. He threatened to scratch Alamo in next day’s race. He himself put Cupide to bed, took away his clothes.

“I’m driving you to the track myself,” he said, next morning, “and staying with you dll you’re mounted.”

“Mais certainement;”
Cupide said, amiably, “why not? Have I not been good, Monsieur Clint! I have not smoked a single cigar now for two weeks, so well I have trained.”

“You’re up to something,” Clint mused, regarding the midget thoughtfully. “When you get to putting on French like that it means mischief.”

“I must say good-by to Kaka, she will make magic to help me win.”

“M’m. I’ll go with you.”

But though Kaka did a good deal of eye-rolling with facial contortions and mumbling and passing of hands over the little man’s head and down the length of his body, her hands were flat, her fingers spread. In spite of himself Maroon watched her fascinated. He drove Cupide to the track, stayed with him until he actually was mounted, a grotesque litde bundle of satin in the brilliant colors of the state of Texas.

“Phew!” he exploded, mopping his face as he joined Clio just before the start of the race. “Why in tarnation I ever said I’d leave him ride Alamo! He shouldn’t ought to be allowed to enter any kind of sporting event except maybe to see who can spit the farthest. He’s got no moral sense, no more than a goat.”

“Such a fuss,
chéri!”
Clio laughed. “You’ve upset him, poor little man! Taking his silly powders away and watching him as if he were a criminal. What harm to give another horse a bit of something, not to hurt him?”

“God A’mighty, the both of you’ll end in jail yet, doggone if I don’t think so!”

Maroon sat moodily as the race began, staring as Alamo cantered to the head of the stretch. But when the field broke away suddenly he stood up, wildly waving his white sombrero, shouting, “Eeeeee-yipeeee! Stay with him Cupide! eeeee-yow!” Something very odd seemed to be happening. Alamo had started at a curiously mincing gait, more like the spirited step of a high-bred horse showing his paces in the Broadway carriage parade than the swift steady pace of a racer. The field swept past him, left him behind with two straggling nags. The tiny mounted figure crouched almost astride the animal’s neck, and now Cupide’s stumpy arm, whip in hand, came up, came down, came up, down. “Leave him be!” howled Maroon. The grandstand and paddock roared. Who had ever heard of whipping a horse at the beginning of a two-mile race! And the whip came down on Alamo’s neck, not his rump. Alamo lurched, recovered, abandoned his high-school gait for a curious bunching of the four feet followed by flinging them wide. It gave him a ridiculous plunging gait like that of a nursery rocking-horse. “Oh, my God!” groaned Maroon; and covered his eyes. But Clio remained smiling, smiling. Mrs. Coventry Bellop was staring at them. Clio smiled. Bart Van Steed, very pink-cheeked, shook a sympathetic head. Clio’s smile grew sweeter. “I’d give a million dollars to be out of here,” groaned Maroon. “Twenty to one shot. Well, anyway, nobody bet on him, that’s sure. Only our couple of hundred between us.”

“He seems to be running quite well,” Clio now observed, mildly. There was something unnatural in her serene composure. Women take things different from men, Maroon thought, somewhat to his own surprise. She’s a wonder and no mistake. His hand rested on her knee, he looked again at the track.

“Take your hand away. They’re watching us,” Clio said, between her teeth. But she need not have bothered. He had leaped again to his feet, the white sombrero was describing circles in the air. Alamo’s gait still was grotesque but it was covering magnificent distances in the beginning of the second mile. He was running, not like a horse, but as a greyhound runs, or a jack rabbit. All four feet bunched under him, then all four spread to unbelievable length. He seemed to go through the air in a series of leaps. From a roar of amusement the crowd now grew hysterical.

“Kangaroo!” they were yelling. “Go it, Kangaroo! Tom Thumb! Let him out, Tom Thumb! He wants to fly!”

The tiny arm had ceased to rise and fall. Cupide, against the dark sweating neck, was like a bluebottle that will not be shaken off.

“He—why he’s—he’s—Clio, it looks like he’s got a chance to win!”

“He will win,” Clio said, calmly.

The curious bounding gait passed the last half-mile, passed the last five in the field of seven, passed the favorite Oh Susanna, reached the post and kept steadily on, bunch and spread, bunch and spread until a score of trackhands and stable-boys swarmed out to stop him. He stopped, too, in a bunch. “Four feet on a dime,” Maroon said later, ruefully. With difficulty they brought him to a standstill, his eyes were rolling, he jerked, pranced, reared.

It was Maroon who lifted Cupide off the horse, hugged him, lighted for him the huge black cigar that he had denied himself like any jockey in training. And Maroon, smiling now, smiling a curious smile with Clio at his side, said, over and over, “Yes, it sure surprised me as much as anybody. I just entered him to please the litde fellow, but he like to sawed Alamo’s head off; it was a wonder the poor critter didn’t roll him off his back. . . . Well, thanks . . . Well, that’s mighty kind of you. . . . Why, no, I just had a few dollars up, not anything to speak of. . . I’d no z’-dea he’d come in, his first race like that.”

But once Clio’s sitting room sheltered them, Maroon confronted her. He was white with rage.

“What did he give him? I’m going to wring his neck, and Kaka’s too. But first tell me—what did he give him?”

“Give him? But who? What is this you are talking?”

“Don’t start that Frenchified stuff with me. You and that witch bitch in there. Disgracing me for life! Kaka!” He strode toward the inner door. “Kaka! Come on out of there or I’ll drag—”

As though on signal there came a knocking at the outer door even as Kaka flung open the bedroom door. She was an imposing figure in her best black silk, stiff and rich, a filmy fichu crossed on her flat breast, her gold earrings dangling, her brooch flashing, her turbaned head held high. In her hand was a silver tray holding small amber-filled glasses.

“Come in! Come in!” Clio called gaily in answer to the knocking at the outer door.

“Coquetier?”
said Kaka, gendy, proffering her tray to Maroon.
“Coquetier?”

A Negro bellboy stood in the hall doorway. “Gepmum from the newspapers like to speak to Colonel Maroon. New York papers and everywhere.”

“I won’t see ‘em. Tell them to go to hell!”

“Oh, I’d see them if I were you, dear Colonel Maroon,” cooed Clio. “They’ll think it so very queer, if you don’t. Isn’t that true?”

Sulkily he followed the boy across the balcony, down the stairs.

“How much you win?” Kaka asked her, smoothly.

“Ten thousand.”

“M’m-m’m! The Colonel’s wrathy. But he wouldn’t let Cupide give the other horses the stop powders, like he wanted to, so he had to give Mr. Clint’s horse the go-ahead medicine.”

“True. In some ways—a few only—Colonel Maroon
il n’a point de raison. “

Mals un homme comme il faut, toutefois, “
Kaka tittered. “Only we must keep away from him for a few days that other one—that monkey—that
homme des bois. “

“Quick, stop that giggling, put down that glass, run after that bellboy, tell him to tell the newspaper reporters that the beautiful Mrs. De Chanfret won ten thousand dollars. Make it fifteen. And let it be known that Mrs. Coventry Bellop, too, was a winner. The well-known society leader . . . That stuff Cupide stuck into him with the butt of his whip—it won’t hurt Alamo, will it? After?”

“No.” Kaka scurried toward the door with a swish of her silks. “Only hurry-up powders. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

XIII

“It is an interesting thing,” Clio reflected, her eyes narrowed in her
thoughtful expression. “He’s as shy as a bird, Van Steed, but he likes to be seen with women who are
dramatique
—spectacular—is that the word?”

“No spika de Angleesh,” retorted Maroon, sulkily. He had not yet quite come round, though three days had elapsed since the race— the Kangaroo race it was called in Saratoga. There had been some ugly talk, but this had quickly died down when it became known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Maroon himself had had a mere hundred dollars on his own horse.

“Clint, I don’t understand you now. You are so different.”

“So are you.”

“No. I am exactly what I said I would be when we planned it all in New Orleans. I did not pretend. I did not try to make you believe that I was one of those good women like your dear mama, and that other you so admire. Everything
convenable.
I am here to make somehow a great deal of money—by marriage, if possible. But safely. You know that.”

“You make me sick,” he said, brutally.

But her tone was equable. “Yes, it makes me a little sick, too. But Mama—and Aunt Belle—and all that in New Orleans—that I saw for years, and there if you like was something to make one really sick. I won’t be like them. I won’t be. I won’t be!” The tears streaming from her wide-open eyes, her lips quivering.

“You sure cry pretty.” But he came over to her and ran his hand almost roughly over her sleek black hair, and then the hand gripped her shoulder, her arms were about him, they clung together, he drank the tears from her eyes.

“You will help me, won’t you,
chéri
? Darling. Darling.” Always she accented the last syllable—dar
-ling. Dar-ling.
It seemed to make the word a thousand times more caressing.

“Now what?”

She sat up, flushed but composed again and almost businesslike. “That Forosini. He rides with her sometimes in the afternoon.”

“I reckon he’s still got the right.”

“But it’s because she behaves like a circus rider. I want to do something that will make her seem dull.”

“Well, get yourself pink tights and spangles and ride down Broadway bareback.” But even as she pouted he said, thoughtfully, “S-a-a-ay! Maybe we can teach Blue Blazes to do her licking trick with you. She likes you.”

Like a child she hugged him. “Clint, you are a good, good man!”

“Oh, my God!” he groaned in protest.

She ran into the next room. “Quick, Kaka! My riding habit.”

Guilia Forosini in her trim black habit was the center of an admiring crowd when she mounted her white horse every afternoon at five. It was quite a ceremony. Her father, white-haired, military of bearing, known to all by his shock of curly white hair, his iron-gray imperial and mustache, led her by the hand down the piazza steps. Always, as she approached her horse, the animal bowed his beautiful head and swung toward her as though inviting her to mount. Usually two grooms accompanied the dark-eyed beauty, often one of the young bloods among the summer visitors; occasionally even Bart Van Steed had been seen to canter with her through the pine-scented paths.

After that first afternoon at five when Mrs. De Chanfret had descended the piazza steps to mount Colonel Maroon’s horse, Blue Blazes, the fickle crowd had deserted the Forosini en masse. The reason was simple enough. Mrs. De Chanfret gave them a better show.

Blue Blazes was blue black. His coat was the color of Clio’s hair. Her gloves were white, her stock was white, she sported a fresh white flower in her buttonhole, her boots shone like Blue Blazes’ back. There was about her the indefinable neatness of the Parisienne. She made the Forosini in contrast seem somehow blowzy. But it was not this alone the crowd had come to see; it was not for this that they had deserted the Forosini just in the act of mounting there at the other horse block. For as she reached Blue Blazes’ side, Clio lifted her veil and Blue Blazes turned his magnificent head and kissed her cheek. The crowd was rapturous.

“Just a little sugar water on your cheek, honey,” Maroon had said when he taught her the trick down at the stables. “Blue Blazes he’ll do anything for a lick of sugar water. I taught him that little knack when he was just a foal.”

Mrs. De Chanfret. That Countess de Traysomething de Chanfret. She uses mascara on her eyelashes you can’t tell me they can be as long and black as that and kind of thick looking. (She used mascara quite artlessly, having seen Aunt Belle Piquery do it for years.) They say she walked right into the gambling room at the Club House where ladies simply aren’t allowed and when they told her that it was against the rules she just smiled and stayed on as brazen as you please. Al Spencer, the manager, came up and spoke to her. She was with that Colonel Maroon. And she stayed, mind you. She says it’s the fashion in Europe, well, all I can say is she’d better go back there—bringing ideas like that into the minds of American womanhood! Even Mrs. Coventry Bellop never went that far, and she certainly does as she likes.

Though Clio Dulaine was busily throwing dust in the eyes of Saratoga so that her real business could be accomplished, she now and then found herself the center of a sensation out of sheer innocence or worldliness; it was difficult to say which.

Though she enjoyed the al fresco dining at the outlying inns and restaurants, there was something very gala about dining at the ornate Club House with its mirrors and gilt, its frescoes and chandeliers. The full-length portrait of John Morrissey, its founder, hung in the hallway, black mustache, gold watch-chain, the famous $5,000 diamond stud, the diamond sleeve links, Prince Albert coat and all. Though death had ended his reign, the lavish standard of the Morrissey ménage persisted.