The pistol cracked. Again the runners came on, swift, straight as arrows. There had been an instant's hush at the start, but now it was forgotten in the uproar. Could it be possible, Wilma wondered, as she leaned far over the rail, hearing above all other sounds the shrill, piercing screech of Willie Trigger, that the great lank figure there at the fore of all the rest, his long legs high lifting, his head thrown back, was the same Bunny who not half an hour before had lagged the second in the race? And yet, as the creature crossed the wire below her and the air became filled with waving canes and hats and handkerchiefs, she knew that such it must have been. Her fingers tightened on the arm of the screaming lad and she drew him close beside her. "Was that Bunny?" she asked eagerly. "They came so fast I couldn't see. Tell me, was it?" He looked up at her, joyful that she had called upon him in her distress, but what he said was only: "Sure; who'd yeh _think_ it was?" She squeezed his arm and he grinned. Something of her great delight was his to know that instant, though he was only a little boy in a soiled and torn shirt waist and she a beautiful girl gay in ribbons and fluffy muslin flounces that made her look for all the world like the fairy in a certain Christmas pantomime, that was one of his fondest memories. "And now let's see when the last will be," she said, glancing down at her program. "They's two 'vents 'fore they run," he explained, for he had learned the order by heart long since. "They's th' pole vault and th' drop kick. Then they'll run th' last time." She looked at him and smiled and he smiled back quite familiarly. "I guess I'll go down now," he said suddenly, and before she could restrain him, for she had found much amusement in his straightforward boyish admiration for one whom she, as well, admired, he had wriggled away and out of sight. She leaned over the rail and saw him on the grass below making swiftly along the front of the stand. For a space he hovered about the edge of the crowd at the door of the dressing-rooms. His chance of entering at last was offered and gliding between divers pairs of legs he sneaked into the long, low room. All was confusion here. Half-clad men ran this way and that, calling for drinks, bath-robes and towels, and among them bustled officiously the man with the big mustache whom he had seen and heard while hidden in the dark hole on the other side of the thin partition. He glimpsed, as well, the other man; his trousers turned up, his coat and waistcoat off, his sleeves rolled to his shoulders. He was busy squeezing lemons into a pail. Presently he poured the contents of another pail into the first, then dumped a bag of sugar into the mixture which he stirred vigorously. "Here, Morrison; don't drink that rotten water; drink this," he shouted and filled a glass from the pail. Morrison, a curly-headed man with knots of muscle on his legs that looked like coils of rope, gulped greedily.