The Black Stallion

body, they stole frequent glances at the colts and equipment being unloaded from the big vans. It was the first time this season they had encountered any raceway stables; having lived and raced with the Jimmy Creeches, they had forgotten the glittering, glistening polish of leather, brass and nickel of the money-backed stables.
    Tom didn't recognize either of the two drivers. "I thought one of them might be Ray O'Neil," he told George, remembering the well-known raceway driver who had smashed Jimmy's sulky wheel at Reading two seasons before.
    "Didn't you read where he's drivin' for the Phillip Cox Company now?" George asked, while running a dry cloth over the colt's body. "He's been giving Silver Knight all his records at Roosevelt Raceway. Got the colt down to two o four last week."
    "I missed that," Tom said. He threw the cooling blanket over Bonfire. "I'll walk him, George," he said, leading the colt away.
    Early that same afternoon, Miss Elsie's trailer drawn by her jeep came down the shed row. Tom and George rose from their canvas chairs before Bonfire's stall the moment they recognized her at the wheel. A groom was sitting beside her. Miss Elsie's arrival stirred activity and interest up and down the row, for in her trailer was one of the two top two-year-olds of the season and perhaps of all time.
    Miss Elsie stopped before an empty stall, and when she heard Tom's call and saw him and George, she pushed her way through the crowd and came quickly toward them.
    She had cut her hair shorter, but that was the only thing different about Miss Elsie. Her horn-rimmed glasses moved up and down as she wiggled her nose while she talked and smiled at them. Only when they told her that Jimmy was very sick and in the hospital did she make an attempt to draw her lips tightly over her prominent white teeth.
    "I want to do anything I can for him," she said seriously. "You know that, Tom, and you, too, George."
    "We know it, Miss Elsie… and thanks. But you know how Jimmy is," George replied.
    "I know," she said. "He never took a favor from anyone in his life. His kind don't. But I want to help, if I can," she offered once more.
    Then they talked about her black filly and Miss Elsie was all smiles again. "Princess Guy's
it
, just as I knew she was going to be," she said. "And she'll go faster than her record of two o four. I know she will."
    "You shouldn't have no trouble in the Futurity," George said. "I hear there'll only be three other horses in it. Your filly scared all the others off—they knowin' how fast she is, I mean."
    "I don't think she'll have any trouble, either," Miss Elsie said confidently. "No two-year-old can keep up with her… and that includes Silver Knight, too," she added quickly. "The Princess will take care of him Saturday night."
    "At Roosevelt?" George asked quickly.
    Miss Elsie nodded her short-cropped head. "In the Two-Year-Old Championship Race," she said. Then Miss Elsie left to help unload her black filly with the four white stockings.
    George said, "She's excited about her filly, all right. But Princess Guy hasn't changed her any. She's still a mighty good woman… Miss Elsie always will be."
    But Tom had turned to his colt. "Yet she never even asked about Bonfire," he said. "She never even asked."
    George turned to him. "That's Miss Elsie," he said. "There's only one two-year-old in the world for her now, an' that's her filly. She can't see no other."
    The next afternoon, Tom, George and Uncle Wilmer stood at the paddock rail watching the racing of the Futurity, and they learned why Miss Elsie was so proud of her black filly.
    The program and the announcer called it a race, but it wasn't. The Two-Year-Old Futurity that day was an exhibition of extreme racing speed given by Princess Guy. Miss Elsie, identified as a woman in her orange-and-blue racing silks only because that fact was pointed out to the crowd by the announcer, drove the filly to win the first heat by ten lengths and the second by fifteen.
    The spectators, expecting a closer race, didn't leave the stands disappointed, because after Princess Guy finished the second heat it was announced to them that the filly had set a new world championship record for two-year-olds of 2:03! Yet the majority of the people who witnessed this creation of a new world record, including George and Tom, were surprised at the sensational time. For the black filly strode so effortlessly, never obviously changing her stride or beat from start to finish,