Will know the name of

"Will know the name of... "

I'm not going to lie to you, me having a crime-solving horse was good
for business.

The horse came from out of Kentucky, I'd read about him in the
newspapers. He had foiled two bank robberies and tracked down the son
of a dog-biscuit magnate who'd been kidnapped by disenchanted
employees. His owner, Harlan Prestwing had reluctantly had to sell him.
This came about after the horse had solved the second bank robbery,
spotting some unlikeable characters abandoning one car and getting into
another. His crime-solving instincts and his nostrils had flared and
he'd given chase. Despite gunfire, he was able to run the gang down and
had the leader pinned down under his hoof when the police finally got
there.

Trouble was, Prestwing's ten-year old daughter Valerie had been riding
him in a gymkhana at the time. Sure, Prestwing got the reward, but it
sure looked as though most of it was going to go on therapy for the
daughter.

So that's where I came along. My previous partner, Bob Gubble, had died
the previous year, having cut his thumb on a broken bottle of Bud and
developed septicaemia. So, I needed a new partner, someone to pick up
some of the workload, but I really couldn't afford to pay much by way
of salary.

I made old man Prestwing an offer and he took it up, showing me first
how to rub the horse's ears in a way that the horse had gotten fond of.
He also advised me to read to the horse from time to time.

Well, it wasn't long before the horse and I had made our first collar,
tracking down a runaway killler who'd concealed himself by taking a
low-paid job in a Burger King. We recovered a nice sum of cash from the
bail bondsman and the story hit the papers around here.

Folks like horses and it brought in the trade. Some folks even asked if
the horse would be handling their case, personal. I always told them
yes, and bumped the fees up a little. Gullible folks deserve a little
stinging from time to time, in my humble opinion.

The horse is called Silver Blaze. He's tall and lean, not ever muscular
enough to be a racehorse, but he'll outrun most everything else.
Chestnut brown he is, save for this flash of white marking that forks
over his forehead. Silver Blaze.

Good partner too. He doesn't talk too much like old Bob, or drink too
much (likewise) and he's got a knack for it. You set him to work and
he's off. Dedicated is not the word.

I used to read Popular Mechanic as a boy, and I was able to rig up a
huge typewriter affair in the barn, so that Silver Blaze could tap out
his own observation reports. He would paw at those big keys and the
mechanism would type out what he wanted to write. Sometimes, he would
seem to frown, as he read it back to himself, hoof hovering over the T
key. He was smart as most people. Not a genius, but he could describe,
in pretty basic English what he'd seen and what he felt it
signified.

As far as I know, I treated him okay. I remembered to stroke his ears
the way Prestwing told me he liked it, he had a warm barn and fresh hay
and water. I rode him at the weekends, let him have a good workout.
Though sometimes we worked together, the more I got to know him, the
more I trusted him to go off and do his own investigations. I read to
him, detective novels mostly, to keep his wits sharpened. We took to
reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes together. He always liked that best,
I'd see his ears prick up and he'd make that harumphing noise through
his nose.

I was as surprised as anyone when he went bad.

It began simply enough. I'd given him someone to track down, small-time
drug user who'd jumped bail. I knew Blaze would have him in a day or
two, yet the horse kept coming back and tapping out that the lead he'd
followed up had fizzled out. Then I found some money stuffed into a
bale of hay. Looking back, I realise now that Blaze had been on the
take from petty crims, giving them a chance to escape in exchange for a
bribe.

A lot of mail started coming for the horse too, and he'd be real
secretive about it. I could hear him unlatching the bolt on the barn
with his nose and moving out to the mailbox, opening it up and taking
stuff out. I don't rightly know what it was he was getting, but I know
that one day I found a brochure addressed to him from a stud farm,
telling him what the running costs of a place like that would be.
Whether he was planning to retire there, or open up his own, I couldn't
tell you.

Maybe if I'd tackled him about it then, put a stop to it... You can
never tell. Blaze did sometimes get moody. I could tell that he wanted
to work the big cases, but the big cases never came our way. We were up
to our necks in dull stuff, but dull or interesting, they still pay. It
never bothered me, but for Blaze, I think it was a big deal. He didn't
want to be a process-serving horse, or a bounty-hunting horse; he had
set his mind on crime-fighting.

Probably the Sherlock Holmes stories just made it that much harder for
him, listening to how the paragon of the profession had gone about
solving cryptic puzzles and helping the great and good of Victorian
England. That, and introducing the horse to the other side of the coin
- Moriarty.

My take on the whole thing is, that the horse decided that if he
couldn't be the great detective, he was going to be the master
criminal.

His reports got sloppy and he began staying out later and later. I'd
heard reports of a gang operating in the area who'd hold people up and
get away on horseback, but I did my best to ignore them.

The jewels were another matter. I don't care how much money a
crime-solving horse on the take can skim from criminals, he can't buy
himself an emerald the size of a goose-egg, which is what Blaze had
hidden in the barn. Smooth and full of green fire, it was.

I had to challenge him on this and ended up with a crescent bruise on
my chest which still hasn't subsided three months later.

From that moment on, my partner had gone rogue. He was on the run.
Every now and then, I heard accounts of gambling clubs being hit,
con-jobs being pulled, small-time crooks who thought they were the real
thing getting roughed up and run out of their towns. The hoofprints
were all over them.

I've got myself a new partner. Edwin, the Wondrous Horse. He ain't so
wondrous. His typing is attrocious and he has been known to bite the
odd suspect as we've been dragging them back to the court or the
jailhouse. The good thing about him is that he runs faster than Silver
Blaze. I've got me some money saved and I've been reading newspaper
reports that I pay an agency to send me. Pretty soon, me and Edwin are
gonna saddle up and go get us a real bounty