THE IMAGE OF THE FATHER
383
Tillford,
also
from Beckersville, who has befriended him many times.
The experience is so central to understanding the story that it must be
quoted at considerable length.
I was standing looking at that horse and aching.
In
some way, I
can't tell how, I knew just how Sunstreak felt inside.... That horse
wasn't thinking about running.... He was just thinking about holding
himself back 'til the time for the running came.... He wasn't bragging
or letting on much or prancing or making a fuss, but just waiting. I
knew it and Jerry Tillford his trainer knew. I looked up and then that
man and I looked into each other's eyes. Something happened to me.
I guess I loved the man as much as I did the horse because he knew
what I knew. Seemed to me there wasn't anything in the world but that
man and the horse and me. I cried and Jerry Tillford had a shine in
his eyes....
Sunstreak does win the race and the other Beckersville entry, a
gelding named Middlestride, finishes second. The hero of the story
was so confident that it would work out this way that he is scarcely
excited. All through the race he thinks about Jerry Tillford and of
how happy he must be. "I liked him that afternoon even more than
I ever liked my own father." Jerry, he knows, has worked with Sun–
streak since the horse was a baby colt, and he imagines that while
watching the race the trainer must feel "like a mother seeing her
child do something brave or wonderful."
That night the boy "cuts out" from his companions because
he feels an impulse to be near Jerry. He walks along a road which
leads to a "rummy-looking farmhouse" because he has seen "Jerry
and some other men go that way in an automobile." He doesn't
expect to find them, but shortly after he gets there an automobile
arrives with Jerry and five other men, several of them from Beckers–
ville and known to the boy. All of them except the father of one
of the boys who has accompanied the hero to Saratoga, a gambler
named Rieback who quarrels with the others, enter the farmhouse,
which proves to be "a place for bad women to stay in."
The boy telling the story creeps to a window and peers in. What
he sees sickens and disgusts him. The women are mean-looking and,
except for one who a little resembles the gelding Middlestride, "but
[is]
not clean like him" and has "a hard ugly mouth," they are not
even attractive. The place smells rotten, and the talk is rotten, "the
