440 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



and with his ghostly finger points to the inventory and demands, 

 "Where is the Lexington filly in that list? You are trying to 

 displace the truth with a falsehood," and he drives this charge 

 home to the heart of each one of them. 



Here we might close this case and leave it to the enlightened 

 judgment of all intelligent and honest people, for there is not 

 a scintilla of evidence that any two-year-old daughter of Lexing- 

 ton was taken to California in 1864. Until this evidence is ad- 

 duced, no attempt to overthrow the contents of John P. Welch's 

 inventory has a single peg to stand on. But I am not yet done 

 with some of the peculiarities that have heen developed in this 

 case, for long ago I learned in this pedigree business, 



" That for ways that are dark, 

 And for tricks that are vain, 

 The heathen Chinee is peculiar." 



At this point the case bifurcates, one fork leading to the Grey 

 Eagle mare as the dam of Waxy, and the other to the Brawner's 

 Eclipse mare, and I think my language will not be wholly un- 

 parliamentary when I pronounce them both frauds. Mr. Levi S. 

 Gould, a worthy business man of Boston, whom I have always 

 esteemed as honest, was the first to dig up this whole matter in 

 the columns of the California Spirit of the Times, and the first to 

 give the above inventory to the public. He traveled thousands 

 of miles and claimed to have traced Waxy to the stable of her 

 breeder, Philip Swigert, of Frankfort, .Kentucky. The full 

 account of his laborious trip was published in Wallace's Monthly 

 for March, 1889, p. 17. In the inventory he found one animal 

 got by Lexington, but this was a bay colij of 1863, and out of the 

 Grey Eagle mare, but he wanted a chestnut filly. After study- 

 ing the matter over, he concluded that this "bay colt" was a 

 typographical error for "chestnut filly" and that this established 

 the pedigree of Waxy. He interviewed a number of people who 

 had known of, or had been in some way connected with, the 

 Welch venture, and they were all able to confirm his discovery of 

 the typographical error, and could recount to a nicety their dis- 

 tinct recollections of the sorrel filly by Lexington, out of the 

 Grey Eagle mare. These people seemed to possess the most as- 

 tonishing memories, and the color, breeding and age of a filly they 

 had not seen nor heard of for a quarter of a century all came 

 back to them with as much freshness as though the events had 



