"Oft, now, I hear him talkin' to 'em, so I do." Mike Aherne was wont to say between spits. "An' they know what he says, I'm tellin' ye. He's a charmer, he is; like the Whisperin' Blacksmith. You've heard tell of him, belike? Well, Danny can spake to 'em widout even a whisper, so he can that!"
That was near seventy years agone, and now Danny was a shrunken little white-haired old wastrel who haunted Mulqueen's Livery over on Twenty-fourth Street near Tenth Avenue, disappearing in and out of the cellar and loft and stalls like a leprechaun haunts a hollow tree. Nobody knew where he had come from or where he lived except that he could always be found wherever there was a suffering animal, be it dog, cat or squirrel, and the rest of the time at Mulqueen's, with whom he had an understanding about the telephone. He was short, wiry, unshaven, with the legs of a jockey; and when he could get it he drank. That, however, was not why he had left Ireland, which had had something to do with Phoenix Park; nor was it the cause of the decline of his fortunes, which had been the coming of the motor.
Some day a story must be written called The Hitching Post, about those thousands of little cast-iron negro boys who stand so patiently on the green grass strips along village streets waiting to hold long-forgotten bridle reins. They lost their usefulness a decade or more ago, and so, by the same token and at the same time, did all that army of people who lived and moved and had their being by ministering to the needs of the horse. The gas engine was to them what the mechanical bobbin was to the spinners of Liverpool and Belfast. With the coming of the motor the race of coachmen, grooms and veterinaries began to perish from the earth. Among the last was Danny Lowry, at the very zenith of his fortunes an unofficial vet to most of the swell stables belonging to the carriage people of Fifth Avenue. One by one these stables had been converted into garages, and the broughams and C-spring victorias, the landaus and basket phaetons had been dragged to the auction room or shoved into dim corners to make room for snappy motors; and the horses Danny knew and loved so well had been sold or turned out to grass.
But there was nobody to turn Danny out to grass. He had to keep going. So he had drifted lower and lower, passing from the private stable to the trucking stable, and from the trucking stable to the last remaining decrepit boarding and liveries of the remote West Side. The tragedy of the horse is the tragedy of all who loved them. Danny was one of these tragedies, but he still picked up a precarious living by doing odd jobs at Mulqueen's and acting as a veterinary when called upon, and he could generally be found either loafing in the smelly little office or smoking his T D pipe on the steps outside.
He and Mr. Ephraim Tutt, the lawyer, who lived in the rickety old house with the tall windows and piazzas protected by railings of open ironwork round which twisted the stems of extinct wistarias, had long been friends. Many a summer evening the two old men had sat together and discoursed of famous jockeys and still more famous horses, of Epsom and Ascot, until Mr. Tutt's cellaret was empty and never a stogy left in the box at all. Probably no one save the odd lanky old attorney, who himself seemed to belong to a bygone era, knew the story of Danny's glorious past—how he had risen from his Uncle Aherne's livery in Dublin first to being paddock groom to Lord Ashburnham and then to jockey, finally to ride the Derby under the Farringdon gold and crimson, and to carry away Katherine Brady, the second housemaid, as Mrs. Lowry when he went back to Dublin with a goodly pile of money to take over his uncle's business; and how thereafter had come babies, and fever, and the epizootic, and hard times; and Danny, a heartbroken man, had fled from bereavement and pauperism and possibly from prison to seek his fortune in America. And then the motor! Lastly, now, a hand-to-mouth, furtive, ignorant old age, a struggle for bare existence and to keep the tiny flat going for his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Katie, who kept house for him and of whose existence few, even of Danny's friends, were aware excepting Mr. Tutt.
There was, in fact, a striking parallel between these two old men, the one so ignorant, the other so essentially a man of culture, in that they were both humanitarians in a high sense. It is improbable that Ephraim Tutt was conscious of what drew him to Danny Lowry, but drawn he was; and the reason for it was that the fundamental mainspring of the life of each was love—in the case of the man of law for those of his fellow men who suffered through foolishness or poverty or weaknesses or misfortune; and in that of his more humble counterpart, whose limitations precluded his understanding of more endowed human beings, for the dumb animals, who must mutely suffer through the foolishness or poverty or weakness or misfortune of their owners and masters.
Danny had sat up all night with only a horse blanket drawn over his legs, taking care of a roan mare with the croup. The helpless thing had lain flat on her side in the straw struggling for breath, and Danny, his heart racked with pity, had sat in the stall beside her, every hour giving her steam and gently pouring his own secret mixture down her throat. Nobody but Danny cared what became of the mare, left there two weeks before by a stranger who had not returned for it; stolen, probably. Cramped, stiff with rheumatism, half dead from fatigue and suffering from a bad cough himself, he left the stable at eight o'clock next morning, hopeful that the miserable beast would pull through, and stepped round to Salvatore's lunch cart for a bowl of coffee and a hot dog. He was just lighting his pipe preparatory to going back to the stable when a stranger pulled up to the curb in a mud-splashed depot wagon.
"'Morning," he remarked pleasantly. "Can you tell me if Mulqueen's livery stable is anywhere about here?"
Danny removed his pipe and spat politely.
"Sure," he replied, taking in the horse, which besides being lame and having a glaring spavin on its off hind leg was a mere bone bag fit only for the soap factory. "'Tis just forninst the corner. I'm after goin' there meself."
The stranger, a heavy-faced man with a thick neck, nodded.
"All right. You go along and I'll follow."
Mulqueen was not yet at the stable and Danny helped unharness the animal, which, as soon as relieved of the shafts, hung its head between its legs, evidently all in. The stranger handed Danny a cigar.
"I'm lookin' for a vet," said he. "My horse ought to have something done for him."
"I can well see that!" agreed Danny. "He needs a poultice and hot bandages. A bit of rest wouldn't do him no harm, neither."
"Well, I'm no vet," returned the stranger with an apologetic grin, "but it don't take much to know that he's a sick horse. I'm a doctor, myself, but not a horse doctor. Have you got one here?"
"Some calls me a horse doctor," modestly answered Danny. "I can treat a spavin and wind a bandage as well as the next. How long will you be leavin' him?"
"Oh, a day or two, I guess. Well, if you're a veterinary I leave him in your care. My name's Simon—Dr. Joseph R. Simon, of Hempstead, Long Island."
Danny worked all the morning over the horse, doing his best to make it comfortable. Indeed, before he had concluded his treatment the animal was probably more comfortable than he, for the night in the cold stall had given him a chill and when he left the stable to go home for lunch he was in a high fever. Doctor Simon was outside on the sidewalk talking to Mulqueen.
"Well, doctor," said he, "what did you find was the matter with my horse?"
"Spavin, lame in three legs, sore eyes, underfed," replied Danny, shivering. "Sure an' he's a sick animal."
"How much do I owe you?" inquired Doctor Simon.
Danny was about to answer that a couple of dollars would be all right when the thought occurred to him that here was an opportunity to secure medical treatment for himself.
"If you'll give me something to stop a fever we'll call it even," he suggested.
"That's easy!" returned Doctor Simon heartily. "Come into the office and I'll take your temperature and write you out a prescription."
So they sat down by the stove and the doctor took Danny's pulse and put a thermometer under his tongue, chatting amicably meanwhile, and when he had completed his examination he wrote something on a piece of paper.
"How long have you been practicing veterinary medicine?" he inquired.
"All my life," answered Danny truthfully. "But I don't get near so much to