None, perhaps, in all that crowd except old Judge Priest saw the two fleeting figures speeding north. All other eyes there were turned to the south, where the county's rival trotters swung round the first turn, traveling together like teammates. None marked Captain Buck Owings as, strangely cumbered, he scuttled across the track from the outer side to the inner and dived like a rabbit under the fence at the head of the homestretch, where a big oak tree with a three-foot bole cast its lengthening shadows across the course. None marked Judge Priest's Jeff coiling down like a black-snake behind an unlatched wooden gate almost opposite where the tree stood. None marked these things, because at this moment something direful happened. Minnie May, the favorite, was breaking badly on the back length. Almost up on her hindlegs she lunged out ahead of her with her forefeet, like a boxer. That far away it looked to the grandstand crowds as though Van Wallace had lost his head entirely. One instant he was savagely lashing the mare along the flanks, the next he was pulling her until he was stretched out flat on his back, with his head back between the painted sulky wheels. And Blandville Boy, steady as a clock, was drawing ahead and making a long gap between them. Blandville Boy came on grandly--far ahead at the half; still farther ahead nearing the three-quarters. All need for breaking her gait being now over, crafty Van Wallace had steadied the mare and again she trotted perfectly--trotted fast too; but the mischief was done and she was hopelessly out of it, being sure to be beaten and lucky if she saved being distanced. The whole thing had worked beautifully, without a hitch. This thought was singing high in Jackson Berry's mind as he steered the stud-horse past the three-quarter post and saw just beyond the last turn the straightaway of the homestretch, opening up empty and white ahead of him. And then, seventy-five yards away, he beheld a most horrifying apparition! Against a big oak at the inner-track fence, sheltered from the view of all behind, but in full sight of the turn, stood Captain Buck Owings, drawing down on him with a huge and hideous firearm. How was Jackson Berry, thus rudely jarred from pleasing prospects, to know that Sergeant Jimmy Bagby's old Springfield musket hadn't been fired since Appomattox--that its lode was a solid mass of corroded metal, its stock worm-eaten walnut and its barrel choked up thick with forty years of rust! All Jackson Berry knew was that the fearsome muzzle of an awful weapon was following him as he moved down toward it and that behind the tall mule's ear of a hammer and the brass guard of the trigger he saw the cold, forbidding gray of Captain Buck Owings' face and the colder, more forbidding, even grayer eye of Captain Buck Owings--a man known to be dangerous when irritated--and tolerably easy to irritate!