The animal remains on its feet,
but exertion is impossible, and neither rein, whip, nor spur serves to
stimulate the cunning poisoner's victim. About the facts there can now
be no dispute: and this last wretched story supplies a copestone to a
pile of similar tales which has been in course of building during the
past three or four years. Enraged men have become outspoken, and things
are now boldly printed and circulated which were mentioned only in
whispers long ago. The days of clumsy poisoning have gone by; the
prowling villain no longer obtains entrance to a stable for the purpose
of battering a horse's leg or driving a nail into the frog of the foot;
the ancient crude devices are used no more, for science has become the
handmaid of scoundrelism. When in 1811 a bad fellow squirted a solution
of arsenic into a locked horse-trough, the evil trick was too clumsy to
escape detection, and the cruel rogue was promptly caught and sent to
the gallows; but we now have horse-poisoners who hold a secret similar
to that which Palmer of Rugeley kept so long. I say "a secret," though
every skilled veterinary surgeon knows how to administer morphia, and
knows its effects; but the new practitioners contrive to send in the
deadly injection of the drug in spite of the ceaseless vigilance of
trainers, stablemen, detectives, and all other guards.
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