Nightingale

Deciding to take up indoor polo, Gabriel ("Frenchy") Loudoux, manager of a Flushing, L. I. riding academy, last autumn bought a small chestnut mare named Nightingale which had had some training in the game. He rarely rented the horse to his customers, keeping her mostly for himself and sometimes letting June Ebdom, a 15-year-old neighbor girl, take her out for exercise. After a few months Horseman Loudoux noticed Nightingale's middle beginning to swell, dismissed it as hay belly, a common winter affliction of horses.

One afternoon last week June Ebdom took the little mare for a workout. They had just started down the bridle path in Flushing's Kissena Park when suddenly Nightingale reared, pawed the air, flopped down in the path. Scared June Ebdom kited back to the stables. "Frenchy" Loudoux sped up just in time to perform a few midwifely duties for Nightingale, before a knot of gaping WPA workers. In three minutes a spindly colt was sprawled on the grass beside her. Rallying quickly, the mare walked to the stables with her foal following in a rumble seat. Loudoux swore that he had no suspicion of Nightingale's condition, that the birth must have been at least a month premature. Prodded by the S.P.C.A., police handed him a summons for the year's rarest case of cruelty to animals.

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