Part 3

"I went at my freak Fonso right away to see if anything could be done with him. I devoted more time to that one than I did to any of my two-year-olds or three-year-olds in training, hoping that he might have something up his sleeve and that it could be dug out of him with careful handling. It was no go. I couldn't get him to do a quarter in better than 35 seconds. Bat or steel had no effect on him. He had a hide like a rhinoceros, and he made the exercise boys weary. Here was a colt born a Fonso, out of a mare that had been of stake class when in training, that was no better than a truck-horse, and at the end of two weeks I gave him up. A circus came along to Lexington, where I had my string, and with the circus, in charge of the performing horses, was an old trainer friend of mine from the St. Louis track who had been chased into the show business by a long run of hard luck. I took him out to look over my bunch, and when he came to the Fonso colt he laughed.

"'Where did you get that world-beater?' he asked me.

"'Oh, that's a Fonso colt that I picked up down the line at a sale a while back,' I told him.

"He didn't exactly call me a liar, but he looked as if he wanted to. Then I told him all about the colt. Like most trainers, he had the blood and breeding bug pretty bad under his bonnet, and he tried to throw it into me that I wasn't giving the colt a fair shake. Told me a lot of stuff that I already knew about some great racehorses that couldn't get out of their own way as yearlings, and tried to convince me that this Fonso thing of mine was liable to fool me up a whole lot as a two-year-old.

"'Well, he doesn't get oats at my expense until he's ready to race,' said I. 'If you think his chances at next year's stakes are so devilish big, he's yours for a quarter of a hundred.'

"'I've got you,' said my friend with the show. 'I'll take him along, anyhow. It's worth that much to a man to be able to say to himself as he smokes his pipe after his work's done that he's got a Fonso colt of his own. And I'll bet you an even $100 that I get one race out of that swayback, anyhow, before he's two years older.'

"I didn't take him. I was disgusted with my hundred dollars' worth of Fonso, and I was glad to get the $25 that my friend in the show business gave me for him. He took the mutt away with the show, and I forgot all about that sentimental purchase of mine for a couple of years.

"I hadn't any killing luck during those two years. In fact, the game went against me pretty strong. Most of the string that I had in training went wrong or showed themselves platers, and when the boss decided to quit racing I was up against it completely. I had two or three platers of my own that made their oats money and a little more, and these I raced on the St. Louis track, pulling down a purse once in a while, and getting second money often enough to keep me in coffee and sinkers. When the St. Louis game closed down at the end of September, a number of us that had small strings struck out for the bush-meetings in nearby States. I shipped my three to a metropolis on the banks of the Missouri River where a State fair was about to be held and where $200 purses were offered for running races. I figured my three lobsters to be as good as any for the bush-meetings, and I calculated on getting one or two of the purses at this State Fair.

"I got into the town--they call it a city out there--with my horses three days before the State Fair was to begin. On the day that I got there a circus that had been exhibiting in the town for two days wound up its season and started East for its winter quarters. I saw the boarded-up wagons passing through the streets on their way to the freight depot. I was watching the dead procession when my circus friend, the man on whom I had worked off my no-account Fonso colt, picked me out of the crowd and came up to me. The circus moving out was the one he had been attached to when last I saw him and sold him the colt.

"'Hello,' said I, 'how many stakes have you pulled down with that one up to date?'

"He dug his hands into his pockets and grinned but made no reply.

"'Have you still got that colt?' I asked him.

"'Yep,' said he.

"'Going to take him along with you to the show's winter headquarters?' I inquired.

"'Sh-sh-sh!' said he. 'I'm not going along with the show. I quit 'em here. Season's over. I've got some business here next week, anyhow. I'm going to race that Fonso on the Uncle Tom circuit, beginning with the State Fair here.'

"Of course, I couldn't do anything else but prod him, and I did.

"'Fact,' said he, seriously. 'Got him entered in the first race on the card--mile.'

"'I've got one in that myself,' I told him. 'Shall we fix it up between us?' I added, just for fun.

"'You might do worse, at that,' said he, sizing me up out of the tail of his eye. 'I'm going to win in a walk.'

"Then I hooted him a good deal more, of course. He let me get through, and he then took me off into a corner and told me some things.

"'That plug like to have broken my heart ever since I got him,' he said. 'I've had him in four or five times already at the bush meetings, but he was never one, two, three, until the last time, when he took it into his head to run when they got into the stretch and was only beaten a nose by a pretty fair bush plug. This was two months ago. The trouble with this Fonso colt you sawed off on me is that he's a sulker. He's got the speed in his crazy-shaped bones, but he won't let it out. Well, between you and me--and I put you next because I know you want a dollar or so as bad as I do--I'm confident that with a douse out of a pail and a bit of a punch with a needle just before post time, he can beat anything out this way. He's out at the Fair grounds now, and I worked him a mile in .48 this morning. He roars like a blast furnace, but his wind is all right, nevertheless. He's still as ugly as ever, if not uglier. I put you next, because it might be a good thing for you to scratch your nag out of that first race and cotton to your cast-off. There'll be a big price on account of his wheezing and his ragged looks.'

"'How did you enter him?' I asked. 'As a Fonso?'

"'Not on your natural,' said he. 'Any old thing's eligible, and I simply told 'em I didn't know the mutt's breeding, that I had him along with me in the show, and just had an idea he might run a little.'

"Well, son, the winter was beginning to loom up, and I wasn't ulstered and swaddled out for it. I went out to the Fair grounds with my friend and looked over the Fonso freak. My friend called him Star Boarder, because he'd been eating circus oats and hay for two years without ever doing a lick of work to pay for his fodder. The colt had, of course, filled out and lengthened, but he was still as homely a beast ever I clapped an eye on. We had him led out on the six-furlong track, and an exercise boy who weighed about 145 pounds took him over the course at top speed. The nag did it in 1.21, and the performance tickled me. The colt had a crazy, jerky, uneven stride, and seemed to go sideways, but he certainly got over the ground lively with that weight up. I saw the chance, and I needed the coin.

"'Can he keep that gait up for the mile?' I asked his owner.

"'He wants four miles,' he replied. 'His roaring is a bluff.'

"'Count me in, then,' said I. 'He'll walk in that race. I'll scratch mine out.'

"We went along the line and looked over the other horses, especially the twelve that were entered for that first race, and, although there were some good-lookers in the bunch, they had been campaigned heavily for months, and were a jaded lot. I scratched my pretty fair horse out of that first race. Then I sold the poorest nag of my three platers to a banker in town for a stylish saddle horse. Got $400 for him. I wanted the money for betting purposes.

"There was a big crowd out at the Fair grounds on the day the racing began. Four books were on, all of them run by representatives of big gambling houses in town. My friend had the Fonso colt taken out of his stall and slowly trotted around the track about three-quarters of an hour before the first race, that in which the horse was entered. The gathering crowd in the stand laughed over the horse's awkward, climbing gait and clumsy appearance. That's what we wanted 'em to do. We wanted the price, or the horse would have been kept in his stall.

"Only seven of the field originally entered for the race went to the post. Now, I didn't have anything to do with conditioning Star Boarder, and I never belonged to the syringe gang, anyhow; I kept strictly away from the paddock and the barns before the race, because I didn't want to see anything. But the way that Fonso colt, with all his clumsiness, held his head up and pranced around as he was going to the post, with a pretty fair boy that I brought along with me from St. Louis on his back, by the way, was certainly great. Dope makes a horse about as perky as three drinks of whisky makes a man who's been off the booze for a long while. The trouble is that the dope doesn't last so long in a horse as it does in a man, and I was pretty anxious for a prompt start, so that the dope in this homely cast-off of mine wouldn't die out.

"The betting on Star Boarder opened at 15, 6, and 3. There was an even-money favorite, a horse that had pulled down a number of mile purses at St. Louis, a 2 to 1 shot, and the others slid up to the nag my friend and I wanted to have win; Star Boarder being the rank outsider at 15 to 1. I put my $400 down on him with the four booked all three ways, $200 to win, $100 for the place, and $100 to show. In the morning my friend handed me $200 of his savings from the circus business to bet. I played his coin $100 to win and $100 a place. I had hardly got the money down before I heard a big whoop of laughter from the stand, and I rushed out to see what was the matter. Star Boarder was running away. There had been a false break, and the fool plug had kept right on going. He had a mouth like forged steel, and the boy couldn't do anything with him. I stood and damned Fonso and all his tribe to the last generation, and I could see my friend in the paddock shaking his fist and grinding his teeth.

"'Oh, well,' said I to myself, 'it's all off, and it serves you bully good and right for not racing your own plugs and letting these con and dope grafts go to the devil.'

"The horse went the full length of the course before he was pulled up, and then he was roaring and wheezing like a sea-lion. The crowd laughed, and the books gave the post-time bettors all the 60 to 1 against Star Boarder that they wanted--which, of course, was none.

"I went back to the paddock then, while the horses were gyrating at the post, and found the brute's owner. I laid him open.

"'To blazes with casting up!' he said. 'Isn't the last of my cush on the skate, too?'

"I felt like ten cents' worth of dog's meat when I slunk back to the stand to see 'em get off. After fifteen minutes' delay at the post--the starter was a farmer--and Star Boarder blowing like a sand-blast and the foam standing all over him from that little six-furlong sprint, away they went in a line, Star Boarder in the lead! Star Boarder at the quarter by a length! Star Boarder at the half by a length! Star Boarder at the three-quarters by two lengths! Star Boarder in the stretch by three lengths! And if that dog-goned, knock-kneed, bone-spavined, no-account maiden Fonso colt didn't just buck-jump under the wire by six clear lengths of open daylight, you can feed me hay and carrots until the next spring meeting and I'll only say thank you kindly, sir!

"I can't, as I say, make out whether that was a case of ringing or not. Anyhow, it was up to the State fair people to make the holler if any was coming, wasn't it? They didn't. The Rube bookmakers did, but they weren't sustained, and they had to dive into their satchels. Star Boarder is over in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to-day, pulling an old lady around in a phaeton, and still holding down the distinction of being the homeliest son of one of the handsomest sires in the history of the American stud."

HARD-LUCK WAIL OF AN OLD-TIME TRAINER.

_He Salts a 100 to 1 Shot Away for a Good Thing and Is Steered Off._

"Washington, as I remember it, was a pretty nice old jogger of a town," said an old-time trainer who got in at Bennings, the race-track near Washington, a few days ago with a well-known string of horses in preparation for the spring meeting there. "I'd like to have a look at it again by daylight. Got in this time after dark and came right out here before sunrise. First time I'd hit Washington for five years--since the fall meeting at St. Asaph in 1894. I surely would like to have another look around Washington. But I guess I'll have to pass it up. I'm not hunting for bother nowadays."

The paddock in which he stood is only a few minutes' run by train from Washington. It seemed odd, therefore, that he did not step on a train and run over to Washington, since, as he said, he hankered for another sight of it. He was asked about this:

"Well," he replied, "I'm waiting for five fellows that I used to know over in Washington to die. When they've all cashed in, maybe I'll have a chance to look around Washington again. But I understand that they're all alive and on edge now, and I don't exactly feel like running into them. I know that I'd never be able to square myself for a thing that happened down at St. Asaph during that fall meeting in 1894, so what's the use of stacking up against the bunch and wasting wind?

"I had a small string of dead ones at that St. Asaph meeting. I didn't get oats money out of them. That year was the frost of my life, anyhow. I started in around the New York tracks in the spring with a bundle of three thousand or so that I had hauled down by backing 'em out on the coast during the winter meeting, and I began to melt before the leaves commenced to show up on the trees. There was nothing doing for me. I couldn't get down right. Nearly a dozen good things that pals of mine with strings had got into the pink of it to send over the plate at long prices wound up among the also rans and the crimp those things took in my wad was something ridiculous. I only handled a few horses during the summer meetings that year on the metropolitan tracks. They were all crabs and did no good. So I had to plug along by shying a ten or twenty into the ring when I heard of something that looked nice. I couldn't even make this clubbing game go through. The books got two out of three of my slips of the green, and I got to wondering how it would feel to drive a truck. They certainly had me down that year.

"When the fall meeting at Morris Park wound up I had $200 and a headache. I was figuring on how I could take this down to the winter meetings in the South and run it up to something worth while, when the owner of the bunch of dead ones I spoke of came along and asked me to take 'em down to St. Asaph and try to get a race or two out of them. I knew they were lobsters, all of these horses, and I was ugly enough to tell the owner that when I wanted a job handling cattle I'd go down to West street and get one, with a sea voyage to Glasgow or London thrown in. There wasn't a horse in the lot that could beat my old aunt in Ireland over the plate for money or marbles; but I decided to take them down to St. Asaph anyhow, just for the sake of keeping on the inside of the game and finding out if there was anything going on that would enable me to run that small shoestring of mine into a tannery. So I took them down to that Virginia clay course across the Potomac and fixed them up the best I knew how. They wouldn't do. St. Asaph was getting some good horses straight from the Eastern tracks then and my platers were never in the hunt--never one, two, six, in fact. Worse than that, the books began taking my little $2 and $5 bets away from me right from the getaway, and I could see a winter ahead in New York with all the trimmings cut out. I met a dozen or so of pretty square chaps in Washington, business men that liked to see 'em run and that used to ask me occasionally what I thought. I landed most of them right on several dead good things without ever getting a dollar on myself from want of nerve, my pile was so low, and they made good, all right, when these things went through. But I was bunking up with such a hoodoo that I sloughed off even this rake-off, and when the thing happened that I am going to tell you about I only had $70 left out of the cozy cush I had started in the season with.

"Now, I've been at this game, on both sides of the fence, for more than twenty years, and, if any man is, I'm dead next to the fact that the horse game is hard and craggy. I never yet was guilty of looking upon the running game as something easy. Yet I'm bound to admit that I often get what you can call, if you want to, a hunch on a horse. Something that a plug does in his running, even if he doesn't get near the money, takes my eye, and from thinking about it I get a hunch on him. I don't get a hunch like this every day, or every week or month, for that matter, but I've noticed that these hunches of mine have gone through nine times out of ten during the past twenty years or so. Well, there was a horse called Jodan that had run in two or three six-furlong sprints at Morris Park that fall, and I had liked his work. He was out of the money in both of those races, but I liked the way he went at his work. That horse Jodan looked to me like he had it in him. These two Morris Park races had been captured, one, two, three by good ones, and I could see when I had a chance to look Jodan over in his stall that he was short of work. The string to which the horse belonged had a poor trainer, and I knew that a good trainer could get some six furlong races out of Jodan. I had a hunch on Jodan, and I fixed it in my head that if ever the horse got into the hands of a good trainer and was brought around right for the six-furlong distance, he'd get a piece of my money, no matter what company he was up against.

"Well, along toward the close of the St. Asaph meeting Jodan turned up at the track with another trainer handling him--a man who had as good a knack of conditioning horses as ever I met up with, and an old chum of mine. I rubbed up with him before he had been on the track fifteen minutes, and asked him what he was going to do with Jodan.

"'I am going to try him out in the first three-quarter event I can squeeze him into,' he told me, 'and I wouldn't be surprised to see him get a piece of it. His right fore-leg is a bit bum, but if it holds together I don't see why the fellows I know shouldn't get a bite off a real good thing in Jodan. He's got a turn of speed, and I've got him dead right. The only thing that worries me is that swollen knee, and I'm doing my best at patching that up.'

"I told him of the hunch I'd had at Morris Park on Jodan, and he told me to stay with it, and he'd attend to his end of it to help me out.

"'There'll be all kinds of a price on him when I send him to the pump,' he said, 'and I'll let you know in time just how he is.'

"Well, that hunch just grew and grew on me. The Washington chaps that I had met and pushed along with the good things that I didn't have the sap to play myself heard from me on the Jodan question. I told them that I had him up my sleeve and to stand by. They had never heard of the horse and they almost side-stepped when I told 'em he was as good as any of them over a three-quarter route--that he had never been got right. There were a lot of six-furlongers down at St. Asaph then that could negotiate the distance in .15 flat, and they couldn't see where a horse that they had never heard of had a look-in with that kind. I held my ground, however, and they said that when it was to come off they'd throw a little bit of a bet at the bird, just because I said so.

"A couple of days later Jodan's name showed up among the entries for a six-furlong sprint, and I had another chaw with his trainer.

"'He's good,' he told me. 'Stay with your hunch. He ought to do.'

"The race was to be run on a Saturday. I looked up my Washington friends and told them confidently what Jodan was going to do with a bunch of the best three-quarter runners in training. Four or five of them couldn't help but give me the hoot on the proposition, and they said they weren't going over to the track, anyhow--too busy closing up the week's business, and so on. They couldn't see where Jodan figured with the lot he was to meet. I went around to the rest of these Washington fellows on the Friday evening before the race and told them again about Jodan. They, too, were all going to be too busy with the Saturday wind-up of business to take in the races that day, but five of them gave me $10 each to put on Jodan for them. None of them had any confidence in the thing, though.

"The Jodan race was the first on the card. There were fourteen entries, and not a horse was scratched. The track was deep in dust, and I knew then Jodan liked that sort of going. It looked like a cinch. I knew that the bookies would be dead to Jodan, but I didn't think they'd take the liberties they did with him. The favorite opened up at 2 to 1, and he was played down to 6 to 5 in no time. Then there were four or five shots in it ranging from 3 to 1 to 15 to 1, when the rank outsiders were written in all the way up to 150 to 1. Jodan, my mutt, stowed away for a good thing, opened up at 100 to 1 and stuck there. I went out to the stable where Jodan was quartered to find his trainer, but I couldn't dig him up. He was mixed up with the bunch in the paddock or in the stand. So I decided that it wasn't necessary for me to see him, anyhow, before putting my money on Jodan. I had seen him the night before, when he whispered to me that Jodan was gorgeous, and that he was going to play him to win, no matter if the books laid 1000 to 1 against the horse.

"So I traipsed around to the ring to put down my money and that of my friends on Jodan. As I say, Jodan's price all over the ring was 100 to 1, and no takers. I had the five tens the Washington chaps had given me and the last fifty spot I had on earth in my mitt, ready to shoot around and plant it in $10 gobs on Jodan before the price could be rubbed, thus standing to win $5000 for myself and $5000 for the Washington fellows, with my share out of their winnings for putting them next. I was the very next man in line to plant my first ten with one of the books, when I felt a hard pinch on my right arm, and I wheeled around suddenly to swat the duck that had given it to me. It was my friend, the trainer of Jodan. He nodded me over to the little vacant space.

"'You were just going to take some Jodan, weren't you?' he asked me.

"'That's what,' said I. 'He'll turn the trick, won't he?'

"'No,' he replied shortly. 'I've been trying to find you for the last hour to tell you. The mutt's got another twist during the night somehow or another, and now it's about twice its right size. Stay off. He can't do it. He's not limping much, but I can't see how he'll go a quarter with such a leg. It'll be a miracle if that hard-luck skate finishes at all.'