But as the time of the sessions drew near, the outlook for me was anything but bright.  It is true that my witnesses were quite willing to depose that his actions were queer and out of the common, but these witnesses were for the most part venerable farmers and backwoodsmen:  expert testimony was deplorably lacking.  In this extremity it was Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke himself who came unwittingly to my rescue.  He had bought a horse,—­he could never be in a place long without one,—­which was chiefly remarkable, he said, for picking up his hind feet as well as his front ones.  However he may have differed from the ordinary run of horses, he was shortly attacked by one of the thousand ills to which every horse is subject.  I will not pretend to say what it was.  I found Mr. Cooke one morning at his usual place in the Lake House bar holding forth with more than common vehemence and profanity on the subject of veterinary surgeons.  He declared there was not a veterinary surgeon in the whole town fit to hold a certificate, and his listeners nodded an extreme approval to this sentiment.  A grizzled old fellow who kept a stock farm back in the country chanced to be there, and managed to get a word in on the subject during one of my client’s rare pauses.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s so.  There ain’t one of ’em now fit to travel with young Doctor Vane, who was here some fifteen years gone by.  He weren’t no horse-doctor, but he could fix up a foundered horse in a night as good as new.  If your uncle was livin’, he’d back me on that, Mr. Cooke.”

Here was my chance.  I took the old man aside, and two or three glasses of Old Crow launched him into reminiscence.

“Where is Doctor Vane now?” I asked finally.

“Over to Minneapolis, sir, with more rich patients nor he can take care of.  Wasn’t my darter over there last month, and seen him?  And demned if he didn’t pull up his carriage and talk to her.  Here’s luck to him.”

I might have heard much more of the stockraiser had I stayed, but I fear I left him somewhat abruptly in my haste to find Farrar.  Only three days remained before the case was to come up.  Farrar readily agreed to go to Minneapolis, and was off on the first train that afternoon.  I would have asked Mr. Cooke to go had I dared trust him, such was my anxiety to have him out of the way, if only for a time.  I did not tell him about the doctor.  He sat up very late with me that night on the Lake House porch to give me a rubbing down, as he expressed it, as he might have admonished some favorite jockey before a sweepstake.  “Take it easy, old man,” he would say repeatedly, “and don’t give things the bit before you’re sure of their wind!”