Here they come, in a smother of dust.  Neck and neck down the stretch.  The red and white of the Morgan stable; the blue and gold of the Desha.  It’s Swallow.  No, no, it’s The Rogue.  Back and forth, back and forth stormed the rival names.  The field was pandemonium.  “Cottonton” was a mass of frantic arms, raucous voices, white faces.  Drake, his pudgy hands whanging about like semaphore-signals in distress, was blowing his lungs out:  “Come on, kid come on!  You’ve got him now!  He can’t last!  Come on, come on!—­for my sake, for your sake, for anybody’s sake, but only come!”

Game Swallow’s eyes had a blue film over them.  The heart-breaking pace-following had told.  Red’s error of judgment had told.  The “little less” had told.  A frenzied howl went up.  “Garrison!  Garrison!  Garrison!” The name that had once meant so much now meant—­everything.  For in a swirl of dust and general undiluted Hades, the horses had stormed past the judges’ stand.  The great Carter was lost and won.

Swallow, with a thin streamer of blood threading its way from her nostrils, was a beaten horse; a game, plucky, beaten favorite.  It was all over.  Already The Rogue’s number had been posted.  It was all over; all over.  The finish of a heart-breaking fight; the establishing of a new record for the Aqueduct.  And a name had been replaced in its former high niche.  The has-been had come back.

And “Cottonton,” led by a white-faced girl and a big, apoplectic turfman, were forgetting dignity, decorum, and conventionality as hand in hand they stormed through the surging eruption of humanity fighting to get a chance at little Billy Garrison’s hand.

And as, saddle on shoulder, he stood on the weighing-scales and caught sight of the oncoming hosts of “Cottonton” and read what the girl’s eyes held, then, indeed, he knew all that his finish had earned him—­the beginning of a new life with a new name; the beginning of one that the lesson he had learned, backed by the great love that had come to him, would make—­paradise.  And his one unuttered prayer was:  “Dear God, make me worthy, make me worthy of them—­all!”

Aftermath was a blur to “Garrison.”  Great happiness can obscure, befog like great sorrow.  And there are some things that touch the heart too vitally to admit of analyzation.  But long afterward, when time, mighty adjuster of the human soul, had given to events their true proportions, that meeting with “Cottonton” loomed up in all its greatness, all its infinite appeal to the emotions, all its appeal to what is highest and worthiest in man.  In silence, before all that little world, Sue Desha had put her arms about his neck.  In silence he had clasped the major’s hand.  In silence he had turned to his aunt; and what he read in her misty eyes, read in the eyes of all, even the shrewd, kindly eyes of Drake the Silent and in the slap from his congratulatory paw, was all that man could ask; more than man could deserve.