Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/93

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
LABELED COMIC

forced to sell him in order that he might pay the chorus salaries, and he had lost all trace of the animal.

Some three years later Morris, McCaull's negro body servant, now servant to Francis Wilson, burst into the office of the Broad Street Theater, Philadelphia, with the news that he had found the stallion.

The colonel jumped into a runabout pulled by two fine bays which were hitched in front of the theater, and asked me to go along. Morris sat on the floor of the rig, his feet hanging out, and we drove out North Broad Street to a German grocery. McCaull described the horse to the grocer, who admitted that the animal was in his stables.

"But he is mad, mad," the grocer protested. "A wicked brute. He nearly murdered my boy and me. For days now no one goes near him. It makes no matter if he was your horse, if you go near him he would kill you."

McCaull stepped to a side door of the grocery and called once. The stallion thrust his head out of the stable door and whinnied excitedly. His former owner walked to the stable door unhesitatingly and the horse laid his head on the colonel's shoulder and whimpered. If a horse

[67]