Part 4

"This was a hard fall for me, I'm telling you that. I had been building on it for one of my cinch hunch things, and to hear that it had gone rank took the nerve out of me. Of course, in a dismal kind of way, I was glad my friend the trainer had put me next to the state of things in time to keep me off the dead one for my whole fifty and the fifty of my friends in Washington, but that wasn't much salve for the hurt I got when he told me that Jodan couldn't possibly do it. With Jodan out of it I felt certain that the 6 to 5 favorite would come in all alone, and so I put the whole bundle down that way $120 to $100. It made me glum to think of the difference between that and $10,000 to $100.

"Then I went up to the stand to see the lot file past on their way to the post. My horse, the favorite, was just a-prancing and looked to me like a 1 to 10 thing with Jodan out. But my trainer chum had put me on right. Jodan's knee was as big as your hat, and he had his limp along with him. One of the stewards noticed this and made a bit of talk about not allowing Jodan to race, but when he was told that Jodan always went to the post with a bum knee, even after his warming up, he closed up and Jodan went around to the pump with his field.

"They got off the first break. The people in the stand were down on the favorite almost to a man, and the yelp they let out when he shot to the lead from the first jump was a heap noisy. My poor old Jodan plug was almost left at the post, but his boy got him going all right, and I was rather surprised to see him quickly join the rear bunch. By this time, at the half, the favorite was just buck-jumping five lengths out in front of the first division. Then the hind ones began to move up, and I stood by to see Jodan get shuffled out of it. But he didn't shuffle. He passed right by the rear gang and nearing the three-quarters he was at the saddle-girths of the front division and going like a cup defender in half a gale.

"'You'll chuck that in a minute, my boy,' I thought, with my mind on Jodan. 'Three-legged races look all right on paper, but they don't go through.'

"I lost the colors when they turned into the stretch, but I saw that the favorite was still a good two lengths in front. The track was so deep in dust that I couldn't make out the others until they were well into the stretch for the lope to the wire. Then when they were all settled down to their barrels in the flying yellow dust, I saw one of the front divisionites behind the leader shoot out around on the outside and bend down to it. Say, I closed my lamps down tight. That horse coming on the outside like a black devil, with his bit almost crunched into flinders, was Jodan. I opened up my eyes when they were about sixty yards from the wire. In the middle of the whirlwind of dust I saw the favorite faltering, with Jodan a neck away and going like as if his distance was only a quarter of a mile and he a-covering it there in the stretch. Then I pulled my glasses away from my head, sat down, shut my eyes again and shook hands with death for a few seconds while the Indians all around me were howling 'Jodan!' 'Jodan!'

"'Jodan wins!' they yelled when the horses got under the wire, and I opened up my eyes just in time to see Jodan with open daylight between him and the favorite. That was a three-legged miracle, all right. I was in a daze, but I had a picture in my head of five fellows in Washington that had treated me right waiting for the race train to get in so that I could hand them each a thousand. I couldn't stand for that, and I had too many different kinds of heartbreak warping me out under my vest to feel like trying to explain the thing to them. So I walked over to Alexandria and caught the afternoon train for Richmond, after leaving my bum string in the hands of another trainer. From Richmond I went on down to New Orleans, where I had some luck--never enough luck, though, to square the game up with me for that win of Jodan's, which made me feel old and tired for a long time afterward.

"If I outlive those five Washington fellows, or they take it into their lids to go to the Klondike together, maybe I'll have another look around under the shadow of that big dome yonder. But I don't want to meet them. Explaining's too hard work, and the circumstances of that St. Asaph happening, which occurred as I've spieled it, were 'agin' me!"

STORY OF AN "ALMOST" COMBINATION.

_It Paid $2,000 to $2, and Looked Like a Winner Until the Last Jump, But----_

There was a period of prolonged, nerve-racking excitement one afternoon last week in a demure and retiring Harlem poolroom that doesn't draw any color line. A colored sport was threatening to tear the place loose from its foundations and to fire a volley over the ruins--in a purely figurative sense, that is to say. Literally he didn't commit any breach of the peace at all. But he had a combination ticket in his clothes for a couple of hours that practically made all the rest of the people in the place forget what they were there for. He was as black as that overworked one-spot of spades. He was known to his envied intimates only as Mose, and the very large checked suit of plaid that he wore had a certain cake-walk suggestiveness, as did his huge red necktie, his patent leathers with blue polka-dotted uppers, and his three large yellow diamonds, two of them on his fingers and the other screwed in the middle of his shirt bosom with crimson horizontal bars. He was a "spote" all right.

He entered the poolroom alone, looked up at the board, and then dug a bit of paper, obviously a telegram, out of his Oxford cloth Newmarket overcoat. A man who was rude enough to look over his shoulders saw that the telegram was a night message and that it bore the New Orleans date. It contained the names of five horses, with the initials of the sender.

"He's a po'tuh on uh Pullman," vouchsafed the sport to the privileged character who had looked over his shoulder at the despatch. "An' he's uh babe, yo' heah me! He knows 'em lak he knows uh blackin' brush. Ah's uh gwine tuh mek uh combinashun on de hull five. De ticket 'll win in uh walk."

After sizing up the house betting on the New Orleans races for a few minutes, he walked up to the counter where the combination tickets exuded from the lightning calculator. Just at that moment there was nothing doing at the combination counter. The sport produced his telegram, cleared his throat, and began.

"Ah's got de hull five babies," he said with a grin to the ticket writer. "An' ah's uh gwine tuh tek 'em all tuh win. Doan' want none o' 'em fo' place or show. Dey's all got tuh come in all alone."

"Shoot 'em out," said the ticket writer.

The sport named the five horses that he knew were going to win the New Orleans races. They were, in the order of the races, Mint Sauce, Russell R., Deyo, Benneville and Donna Rita.

The ticket writer executed his bit of lightning head work, with frequent glances at the board to get the prices on the runners, and then he looked up at the sport with a grin.

"Huntin' for a hog killin', ain't you?" he asked. "Goin' to put us out o' business? It figures a thousand to one. How much do you want on it?"

"Two dolluhs," replied the sport and he passed up the money. The ticket writer pencilled the names of the horses down on the ticket, placed the figures "$2,000 to $2" at the bottom of it, and handed the bit of pasteboard to the sport with the remark:

"You're a good thing. Come again."

"Yo' all kin do yo' hollern' w'en de hosses run," was the sport's good-natured reply, and then he went to the extreme outer row of seats in the pool room and sat down to wait for $2,000 to accrue to him on an investment of $2.

Along toward 3 o'clock the betting came in on the first race at New Orleans. The horse Mint Sauce that the sport had in his combination ticket was the odds-on favorite, although he had been at a good price in the house betting. The queer crowd of players surged up to the counters to put their money down on things they liked, that figured all right in the dope books; but the sport kept his seat. His speculation for the day was over. He was simply waiting for his $2 to grow to $2,002.

Then they were off at New Orleans, as the telegrapher announced with a bored air, electrifying the crowd into silence. It was a six-furlong race, and there was nothing to it but Mint Sauce all the way. At the three-quarters, when the telegrapher announced that Mint Sauce was third and just galloping, the sport leaned back in his seat with an it's-all-over expression, snapped his fingers a couple of times for luck, and said:

"It's uh cake-walk fo' dat baby. Ah'm on right so far."

"Mint Sauce wins by two lengths," announced the operator, and the announcement was received with silence. Poolroom crowds don't play favorites as a rule.

"Mah nex' is this heah Russell R.," said the sport, gazing at his ticket again, "an' Russell R. he's dun got tuh win. Ah feels uh leetle squeenchy uhbout he all, but Russell R. he'll buck-jump in."

The betting came in on the race a few moments later, and Russell R. was at a long price. Several horses in the race were at much shorter prices. The sport didn't look worried a little bit over this.

"Russell R. he's dun got tuh win," he said, and that was all there was about it.

"Off at New Orleans," announced the weary looking operator again, and then he began to call off the way the race was being run. It looked bad for the sport's ticket until the telegrapher had carried the nags along to the three-quarter post and then Russell R., who hadn't been anywhere, got his first call, joining the bunch as third at that stage of the journey.

"Sadie Burnham in the stretch by a length!" announced the telegrapher. "Lomond second by a length, Russell R. third," and then the sport began to root for his horse. He swayed back and forth in his wicker rocking chair, moaning, "Come, yo' Russell hoss! Yo' heah me uh-talkin', hoss--come, yo' Russell--or yo' doan' git no oats--ketch him, yo' baby, an' yo' pa'll treat yo' right"----

"Russell R. wins, by a head!" announced the telegrapher.

"Oh, yo' wahm thing, yo' Russell!" suppressedly exclaimed the sport, his finger-snapping suddenly stopping and an upturned crescent grin spreading over the whole area of his chocolate countenance.

It seemed that some of the less important sports must have been "riding" Russell R. too, for their exultant "Uh-huhs!" rang around the room. The colored sport dearly loves a long shot.

"De nex' on mah piece o' pas'e-boa'd," said the sport, ransacking through his pockets again for his ticket, "is dain'jus. Ah doan' lak dis heah hoss Deyo, but Ah ain't uh-playin' whut Ah laks, but whut's dun sent tuh me. So Deyo she's dun got tuh win, too."

It was after 4 o'clock by this time, and the poolroom was filling up with young fellows turned loose from the down-town offices. Many of these late arrivals had straight tips in the form of telegrams on the third race at New Orleans and they almost overwhelmed the ticket writers. When the betting came in on that race Deyo was at a long price, much longer than the house betting had quoted the nag, and the sport looked a bit anxious over this. His worried look disappeared, however, when the second line of betting came in, showing that Deyo was being backed down some on the New Orleans track.

"Dey's sumthin' uh-doin' on that mule," he said, and the telegrapher began to call off the race. It was something easy for Deyo, who beat the favorite by three lengths. The sport didn't have to snap his fingers or sway in his chair at all. Deyo was in front all the way. Three-fifths of the $2,000 to $2 ticket was won.

By this time the sport was the cynosure of a good many pairs of eyes. The possibilities of the ticket he had in his pocket were whispered about, and a number of the real things in the sport line edged over and asked to have a look at the ticket.

"It's a alimpey-boolera," they said, and they rubbed the back of it for luck. Then a lot of them went up to the combination desk and got combination tickets for the remaining two horses that appeared on the colored sport's ticket. By the time the betting came in on the fourth race it was known all over the room that the sport had a $2,000 to $2 ticket with three of the horses already over the plate. The sport enjoyed it all with becoming modesty.

"Dis heah hoss, Benneville, will now step out an' run seben fuhlongs fo' me," he said, referring to his ticket again. "Ah doan' know mahse'f jes' how good dis heah Benneville is jes' now, but dis is his day tuh win by uh block."

Benneville came in an odds-on favorite, and won by three open lengths. The sport again was relieved of the necessity of rooting.

"Ah'n dun rode dat one mahse'f," he said grinning, and he found himself in the middle of a crowd of sports of his own color.

"Look uh-heah, nigguh, doan' yo' all remembuh me?" a lot of them inquired of him as they crowded around him.

"Remembuh nothin'," said he impartially. "Ah doan' mek it mah bizness tuh remembuh nobody."

"Hey, what does your ticket call for in the next?" was a question that fifty men threw at him as he sat in state in his wicker rocker.

"De nex' skate on de list," he replied, spelling out the letters on his ticket, which was being rubbed a good deal for luck by all hands within rubbing distance, "is de maiuh Donna Rita. Ah wouldn't give $2 fo' Donna Rita mahse'f, de way she's bin un-runnin', but Donna Rita's dun got tuh walk in all by huhse'f dis time," whereupon he returned the ticket to his pocket as if it already represented $2,002.

The sport had got down Donna Rita into his combination at a long price in the house betting. When the first line of betting came in from New Orleans, however, Donna Rita was seen to be the favorite for the race, with a big field to beat.

"Donna Rita's lak gettin' money in uh lettuh," said the sport, and every man in the room that heard these words of wisdom from the lips of the man with the magical combination ticket in his pocket, played Donna Rita to win. So here was the sport, enthroned like any monarch of Dahomey, with the crowd surging around him. One of the white sports, waving a roll as big as his fist, elbowed his way through the crowd surrounding the colored sport and flatly offered him $500 for his ticket, after looking at it and seeing that Donna Rita, much the best horse in the next race, had her name inscribed there. It was a temptation, but the sport was game, and stood pat.

"Dis heah ticket ain't fo' sale," he said. "De two thousan's good enough fo' this coon."

Another man offered him $800 for his $2 ticket. The offer was declined. There wasn't a man in the crowd that wasn't rooting for the sport's ticket to wind up all right, and to make their rooting more effective they played Donna Rita to win the last race almost to a man. The less important sports were keeping close to their brother in hue. They wanted to be in at the finish--perhaps to help the sport to celebrate. At post time there was hardly a man at the betting counters. They were all hovering near the sport for luck.

"Off at New Orleans!" shouted the telegrapher, who knew about the sport's ticket by this time, and there was a note of unusual excitement in his voice as he called off the race. "Donna Rita in the lead!"

"Oh, yo' babe, Donna!" shouted all the "spotes" in unison, and "stay right theah, yo' nigguh!" shouted the one particular sport.

"Donna Rita at the quarter by five lengths!" called out the telegrapher, and the poolroom might have been taken for an Emancipation Day festival. "Donna Rita at the half by five lengths!"

"Ef yo' lubs yo' man, come uhlong!" moaned the sport in ecstasy.

"Donna Rita at the three-quarters by three lengths, Kisme second, Virgie O. third," droaned the operator. "Donna Rita in the stretch by a head!"

The sport rocked to and fro and groaned.

"Virgie O. wins by a nose!" announced the telegrapher.

That settled the combination. The sport's followers fell away from him like autumn leaves from wind-tortured trees.

"They ain't nothin' in this horse-racin' game, is they?" the frequenters of the poolroom said to one another as they slouched out, and the grating tones of the cashiers counting bills soon echoed through the deserted room.

"RED" DONNELLY'S STREAK OF LUCK.

_He "Runs a Shoestring into a Tannery," and Then Gets the Cold Shoulder from the Lady Fortune._

A party of turfmen in Washington for the Benning meeting were talking the other evening of the remarkable streak of luck which has enabled Billy Barrick to run a borrowed shoestring of $200 up to an amount which is now said to approximate $100,000 in the last six weeks.

"Barrick's double-ended luck, both at faro bank and horses," said one of the bookmakers in the party, "is a whole lot out of the common. Luck is a full-bred sort of an affair, and it does not often run along hybrid lines. What I mean to say is that the man who has a huge run of luck at one game almost invariably falls into the doldrums and goes all to pieces when he switches to another game. The luckiest men I ever knew on the turf, for example, were the unluckiest card players, and most of them stubbornly spent a good many thousands of their pony winnings before they found this out. Barrick seems to be an exception. He has got into the current, and he could probably get away with the money at fan-tan or Cingalese pool while he's in his present shape. I'm a bit afraid of him just now myself, and when I see his commissioners bearing down on my book I'm sorely tempted to rub the whole slate until I get a chance to rubberneck and find out what they're after. If I were dealing faro bank, so weird has his luck at tiger-bucking been lately, too, that I believe I'd make it a thirty-cent limit when I saw him coming. But he's an exception, as I say. It's the man who sticks to the one game that drives the swaggerest dog-cart and wears the whitest gig-lamps in the long run.

"I remember a chap out in St. Louis who ran a shoestring of five cents up to pretty close to six figures in the summer of 1895. He bucked more games in doing it, too, than Barrick has thus far, but he couldn't go a route, and they ate him up when the whisky got into his head in such quantities that he saw treble without having a focus on anything. His name was Red Donnelly, and he had charge of the bookmakers' paraphernalia in the betting ring of the St. Louis fair grounds when the Lady Fortune beamed upon that nickel of his and invited him to bask for a time in her domain. He was a loose-jointed spraddle-shaped sort of a young chap of 25 or so who had been hanging around the St. Louis tracks from his early boyhood. He learned so much about the horses that he could never win anything on them when he played in the ten-cent books made by the railbirds. He handicapped them down to the sixteenth of a pound, and the horse that he put his dime on consequently got beaten, as a rule, by a tongue. He had been holding down the job of a dog-robber for the bookmakers for two seasons before he struck his lead on that nickel. He came out to the track one day, early in June, 1895, with the solitary nickel reposing in the depths of his trousers' pockets, salted there to pay his fare back to the city. He got to pulling the five-cent piece out of his clothes and looking at it longingly by the time the first race was due. He wanted to get down on a race, but there were no five-cent books. The bottom sum accepted by the railbird books was a dime. Red strolled out to the barns and got to pitching nickels with a pack of idle stable boys. The luck was with him from the jump, and when he accumulated a dollar in nickels he exhibited symptoms of a man suffering from chilblains. His reason for getting cold feet was that he had a good thing in the fourth race, and by the time he had acquired the dollar the betting had begun on the fourth race.

"Red hurtled himself into the ring with his dollar and saw that the price offered against his good thing, the old nag Hush, was 60 to 1. Donnelly needed a bundle of cigarettes and a few drinks pretty badly, but he was game when it came to sticking to his good things, and he slapped his twenty nickels down on Hush with a bookmaker he knew. He took good-naturedly the mocking hoot which the booky gave him for handing in twenty pieces of that kind of metal, and catapulted himself out to the rail just as the horses went away from the post. The race was really something silly for Hush, in the unwieldy field of nineteen horses. Hush led all the way, and pranced under the wire first in a big gallop, pulled double. The boy had Hush up in his lap all the way.

"Red had some difficulty in collecting his $61. The bookmaker knew him well, knew of his taste for rum, and knew also that few of Red's rare dollars ever found their way to the humble shack of the man's infirm old Irish mother.

"'I believe I'll just pinch this out on you, Red,' said the booky to him, 'and pass it along to the old lady when I go in to-night. It won't do you any good.'

"'Come to taw,' replied Red. 'I want to put thirty or forty cents down on the next race. I got another good thing in it.'

"The bookmaker reluctantly passed Donnelly the $61. Red carefully folded the dollar bill and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he invested the $60, in $10 clips, with six books, on Dorah Wood, in the next race, at 15 to 1. It was a canter for Dorah Wood, and Red knocked the bookmakers silly--they all knew him well from his working around the place--by socking it to six of them for $150 each. A committee of safety was immediately formed around Donnelly, but he couldn't be held down. He tossed a quart of wine under his waist-line, purchased a package of cigarettes made in Turkey for forty cents, and looked over his dope-book carefully. Then he strolled into the ring and bet $900 on Minnie Cee in the last race. Minnie Cee was at 3 to 1, and it was something ridiculous for her. She won on the bit, and Red was $3,660 to the good on that nickel that he had salted away in his homespuns for the return trip to town.

"When Red turned up to collect, Barney Schreiber--he's a big-hearted Barney--had him, as it were, by the scruff of the neck. Barney announced to all of us that he was going to collect for Donnelly, and what Barney said went with us, for we all knew Red's propensities. Donnelly put up a weak growl, but he knew 'way down deep in him that Schreiber could and would take care of the cash better than he could or would. Barney pinched $3,500 of the wad, inserted it in a separate compartment of his wallet, and handed Red $150.

"'I'll just let you have a little change, Red, said he, 'and if you think you can run that up into a tan-yard, go ahead. But I'm a-going to handle this for you the right way. You're not tied enough in your ways to have such a vast sum on your person all at one and the same time.'

"Donnelly didn't demur much. The $150 was a huge sum itself for him, and he, of course, knew that Schreiber would do the right thing with the main bunch. As a matter of fact, Barney deposited the $3500 the next day to the credit of Donnelly's old mother, and Schreiber and the old woman were the only people who knew anything about that end of it for a long time afterward.