Through the winter the various threads of men's destinies, golden and black, gay and sombre, too fine for human eye to see, too strong for human might to break, were being woven into the intricate pattern of life and fate. Though miles lay between the many men whose lives were unalterably mingled, though each man went selfishly or unselfishly about his own pursuits, although each fashioned daily his life for the day, still the mills of God were grinding, the looms were weaving, and grist and kernel, warp and woof found their way from the individual existences into the scheme of the whole. Dart had left with Mrs. Leland and Wanda and made a straight line to Big Bill and Little Saxon. He made it his own special business in life to see that no knockout stuff was slipped into the horse's oats, that no slippery gent got the show to put Little Saxon out of the game. He even took the precaution to partition off a tiny room for himself in the hay loft above Little Saxon's stall, where he spent the nights dozing and snatching up the ancient shot gun down the muzzle of which his enthusiastic fingers had rammed enough buck shot to explode the piece and blow himself as well as any unhappy intruder into that land from which there is no return. Big Bill, acting foreman now, took upon himself the unremitting work of making the racehorse fit. Nearly as good a man as Shandon with animals, he continued through the winter the task that had been little more than begun. The fact that the man who had first proposed the races which were to be run off in the Spring, was a fugitive, accused of a grave crime, had aroused much sensational talk and newspaper babble, but it had increased rather than lessened interest and new entries were being daily arranged. Big Bill assured those who cared to ask that the race would be run, that Shandon would have come in and been cleared of any charges against him long before June, and that there would be no change in plans. And though he sometimes doubted the statement he made so bluntly he let no single day pass without adding to Little Saxon's education.