The Case of the Fan-Dancer's Horse

Chapter number 12

A high board fence carried in green letters a sign which read, ELITE-ACME CONSOLIDATED STABLES AND RIDING ACADEMY.

“That the place?” Mason asked.

Drake nodded.

He slid the car to a stop in front of a small building marked office. The three of them went in.

A man who was busily engaged in writing with big-handed awkwardness on a pile of invoices, put aside the pen and looked up as though he welcomed the interruption. “Something I can do for you folks?” he asked.

Drake said, “My name’s Drake. I had a conversation with someone out here about boarding a horse.”

“Oh yes. I’m the one you talked with. The horse just came in. He’s still in a trailer out there at the stables. The man didn’t know very much about what arrangements you’d made. Now the question is, what kind of feed do you want this horse to have? I have some very fine oat hay and...”

“Oat hay and a little grain,” Lois Fenton said, quite positively. “Not too much grain. I don’t want him to get too hot — just enough to keep him on his mettle, and he should be exercised. If I shouldn’t be able to get out here to ride, could you arrange for that?”

The man looked at her in appreciative appraisal. “He’s thoroughly gentle?”

“Perfectly.”

“Okay, I can arrange to exercise him.”

“Not on roads,” Lois Fenton said. “Just around bridle paths, and I don’t want him raced.”

“Sure, sure,” the man said, soothingly. “I’ve got some good boys here. When I say exercise, I mean exercise. You folks want to go look at him now?”

“Please.”

“Out this way,” the man said, and opened a back door which led to the inside of a long, circular track back of the board fence. Over at the far end were stables, and in front of these stables an automobile with a horse trailer was standing facing them. A couple of men were engaged in unloading the horse.

As the party approached the trailer, they heard the booming sound of the horse’s shod feet on the lowered tail gate of the trailer. They caught a glimpse of a tossing head. Then suddenly a horse pranced into view, pulling back against the bridle reins which were held by a lad who braced himself by thrusting the high heel of a cowboy boot down into the soft ground.

“Starlight,” Lois Fenton called. “Here boy, here Starlight!”

The horse turned his head. The ears came forward.

“Starlight,” Lois Fenton called again.

The horse answered with a low nicker.

“Let him go,” Lois Fenton called to the man who was holding him. “He’s all right now.”

The man looked at the horse, then dropped the bridle reins. Starlight turned to face them, his ears still forward, his head up in the air, the bridle reins hanging down to the ground. Then, swiftly turning his head to one side so that the bridle reins dragged clear of his feet, the horse came mincing toward them.

“Look at how clever he is,” Lois Fenton said. “He knows he’s supposed to stand when the reins are dropped, but when he wants to go somewhere he just turns his head to one side so he doesn’t step on the reins, and look at how he travels.”

Lois Fenton stepped forward a couple of paces. The horse came to her, nickered again in throaty affection, nudged her with his head, then raised a soft velvety nose, put it against the girl’s cheek and wrinkled his upper lip.

The man who ran the stables laughed and said, “It’s her horse, all right.”

“Where’s the saddle?” Mason asked, walking toward Drake’s operative who had been driving the car.

“In the back of the car,” the man said. “And I put on new bridle reins. The old ones are with the saddle. One’s broken off. I have the end of it.”

“Do you want some money in advance?” Mason asked the riding academy owner.

“Brother, I want money whenever I can get it,” he said, fervently.

Mason took out a billfold, handed him a fifty-dollar bill. “Take good care of the horse.”

The man looked at the bill almost reverently, then slid it down into the side pocket of his trousers. “Sure, we’ll look after him. He’ll be all right. Where did he come from? Up from the Imperial Valley?”

“That general neighborhood,” Mason said. “In case the young lady wants to be near the horse for a day or two, is there some place around here where she can stay?”

“There’s an auto court down the road about a quarter of a mile.”

“Good place to stay?”

“Fair.”

“That’s fine,” Lois Fenton said. “I’ll stay there and whenever I want the horse I’ll telephone. I suppose you can send a boy down with it?”

“Yes, ma’am. If it’s no farther than that auto court, I can.”

Lois Fenton smiled reassuringly at Perry Mason. “I’m all fixed,” she said. “Please don’t worry about me.”