“Not that she knew you at first, a bit in the world,” Aileen said. “I watched her face pretty close, and I’m sure she thought you were some grand gentleman, a friend of the Commissioner’s and the Mr. Dawsons.”

“My dearest girl,” said he,“it was a promise I made months since that I should attend Bella’s wedding, and I never break my word, as I hope you will find. These girls have been good friends and true to us in our need. We all owe them much. I don’t suppose we shall cross each other’s path again.”

There wasn’t much more time. We both had to move off. He had just time to catch his drag, and I had to get my horse. The Dawsons bullied him a bit for keeping them waiting, and swore he had stayed behind to flirt with some of the girls in the church after the wedding was over.

“You’re not to be trusted when there’s temptation going,” Jack Dawson said. “Saw you talking to that Marston girl. If you don’t mind you’ll have your head knocked off. They’re a rum lot to deal with, I can tell you.”

“I must take care of myself,” he said laughing. “I have done so in other lands, and I suppose yours is no exception.”

“This is a dashed queer country in some ways, and with deuced strange people in it, too, as you’ll find by the time you’ve had your colonial experience,” says Bill Dawson; “but there goes the saddling bell.”

The course had 20,000 people on it now if there was one. About a dozen horses stood stripped for the race, and the betting men were yelling out the odds as we got close enough to the stand to hear them. We had a good look at the lot. Three or four good-looking ones among them, and one or two flyers that had got in light as usual. Rainbow was nowhere about. Darkie was on the card, but no one seemed to know where he was or anything about him. We expected he’d start at 20 to 1, but somehow it leaked out that he was entered by old Jacob Benton, and that acted as a damper on the layers of the odds. “Old Jake’s generally there or thereabouts. If he’s a duffer, it’s the first one he’s brought to the post. Why don’t the old varmint show up?”

This was what I heard about and round, and we began to get uneasy ourselves, for fear that something might have happened to him or the horse. About 8 or 9 to 1 was all we could get, and that we took over and over again.