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“Oh,” she chirruped, in the liveliest of humors, “you will have to excuse me for today. Deacon Hawkins overtook me on the way here, and here said I had simply got to go sleigh-riding with him. He’s waiting out at the gate now.”

“Is that so?” exclaimed the society unanimously, and rushed to the window to see if it were really true.

“Well, did you ever?” commented Sister Poteet, generally.

“Hardly ever,” laughed the widow, good-naturedly, “and I don’t want to lose the chance. You know Deacon Hawkins isn’t asking somebody every day to go sleighing with him. I told him I’d go if he would bring me around here to let you know what had become of me, and so he did. Now, good-by, and I’ll be sure to be present at the next meeting. I have to hurry because he’ll get fidgety.”

The widow ran away like a lively schoolgirl. All the sisters watched her get into the sleigh with the deacon, and resumed the previous discussion with greatly increased interest.

But little recked the widow and less recked the deacon. He had bought a new horse and he wanted the widow’s opinion of it, for the Widow Stimson was a competent judge of fine horseflesh. If Deacon Hawkins had one insatiable ambition it was to own a horse which could fling its heels in the face of the best that Squire Hopkins drove. In his early manhood the deacon was no deacon by a great deal. But as the years gathered in behind him he put off most of the frivolities of youth and held now only to the one of driving a fast horse. No other man in the county drove anything faster except Squire Hopkins, and him the deacon had not been able to throw the dust over. The deacon would get good ones, but somehow never could he find one that the squire didn’t get a better. The squire had also in the early days beaten the deacon in the race for a certain pretty girl he dreamed about. But the girl and the squire had lived happily ever after and the deacon, being a philosopher, might have forgotten the squire’s superiority had it been manifested in this one regard only. But in horses, too—that graveled the deacon.

“How much did you give for him?” was the widow’s first query, after they had reached a stretch of road that was good going and the deacon had let him out for a length or two.

“Well, what do you suppose? You’re a judge.”

“More than I would give, I’ll bet a cookie.”

“Not if you was as anxious as I am to show Hopkins that he can’t drive by everything on the pike.”

“I thought you loved a good horse because he was a good horse,” said the widow, rather disapprovingly.

“I do, but I could love him a good deal harder if he would stay in front of Hopkins’s best.”

“Does he know you’ve got this one?”

“Yes, and he’s been blowing round town that he is waiting to pick me up on the road some day and make my five hundred dollars look like a pewter quarter.”

“So you gave five hundred dollars for him, did you?” laughed the widow.

“Is it too much?”

“Um-er,” hesitated the widow, glancing along the graceful lines of the powerful trotter, “I suppose not if you can beat the squire.”

“Right you are,” crowed the deacon, “and I’ll show him a thing or two in getting over the ground,” he added with swelling pride.

“Well, I hope he won’t be out looking for you today, with me in your sleigh,” said the widow, almost apprehensively, “because, you know, deacon, I have always wanted you to beat Squire Hopkins.”

The deacon looked at her sharply. There was a softness in her tones that appealed to him, even if she had not expressed such agreeable sentiments. Just what the deacon might have said or done after the impulse had been set going must remain unknown, for at the crucial moment a sound of militant bells, bells of defiance, jangled up behind them, disturbing their personal absorption, and they looked around simultaneously. Behind the bells was the squire in his sleigh drawn by his fastest stepper, and he was alone, as the deacon was not. The widow weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, net—which is weighting a horse in a race rather more than the law allows.