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 the track, now good for nothing whatever. There were horses with clumsy, ill-shaped legs and awkward feet, that could hardly raise one hoof without setting it down on another. There were horses, naturally of good disposition, which had been made irritable and vicious by bad training. There were horses with all sorts of bad habits. There were horses with the heaves, horses with ringbone, spavin, stringhalt, and a dozen other equine diseases and defects.

The really good horses were very few in number; because a good horse can readily be sold near home and for a good price. The farmer used Court Day as an occasion for trying to get rid of the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the aged.

Everybody knew this; and yet everybody who had a little money in his pocket and many who had none at all, bought and traded horses on Court Day. It had become a passion which swayed in spite of reason, like the lure of the lottery or the seduction of the gaming table. Horse trading, with the drinking which accompanied it, was to these lonely tobacco growers their one joyful extravagance. It was their dissipation, their romance, their single oblation to the god of life and joy.

Around the corner of a side street, the Blackford party glimpsed Uncle Sam Whitmarsh in conversation with a lithe young man wearing a broad felt hat over a face that betokened life in the open air. Each man was holding the bridle of a horse. Coming up to see what it was all about, they found that a trade was in progress.

Uncle Sam was never so taken up with a trade that he had no time for his friends. He beamed a welcome on his good neighbors and his son-in-law.

"Howdy, Jerry. Howdy, Joe. Waal, Judy, you're a-lookin' like a rose in May. You don't mind a old man like me tellin' yer wife she's handsome, do you, Jerry? . . . No, stranger, the mare's too light. I hain't got no youst for her no more'n a hen has for teeth."

The horse that Uncle Sam held by the bridle was a heavily built iron gray work horse apparently about twelve years old.