Burgess had found him sitting on an upturned pail in front of the stable that housed “Lord Templeton” at six o’clock of the morning of the day the stallion strode away from a brilliant field and won an enviable prestige for the Burgess stables. Inspired by Wrong Number’s confidence, Burgess had backed “Lord Templeton” far more heavily than he had intended and as a result was enabled to credit a small fortune to his horse account. For four seasons the boy followed the Burgess string and in winter made himself useful on the Burgess farm somewhere north of the Ohio. He showed a genius for acquiring information and was cautious in expressing opinions; he was industrious in an unobtrusive fashion; and he knew about all there is to know about the care and training of horses. Being a prophet he saw the beginning of the end of the Horse Age and sniffed gasoline without resentment, and could take an automobile to pieces and put it together again. Burgess was his ideal of a gentleman, a banker, and a horseman, and he carried his idolatry to the point of imitating his benefactor in manner, dress and speech. Finding that Wrong Number was going into town for a night course in a business college, Burgess paid the bill, and seeing that Wrong Number at twenty-two had outgrown Horse and aspired to a career in finance, Burgess took him into the bank with an injunction to the cashier to “turn him loose in the lot.” While Mrs. Burgess enjoyed the excitement and flutter of grandstands, her sense of humor was unequal to a full appreciation of the social charm of those gentlemen who live in close proximity to Horse. Their ways and their manners and their dialect did not in fact amuse her, and she entertained an utterly unwarranted suspicion that they were not respectable. It was with the gravest doubts and misgivings that she witnessed the rise of Wrong Number who, after that young gentleman’s transfer to the bank, turned up in the Burgess town house rather frequently and had even adorned her table.