Part 8
"That's all I was huntin' f'r," said the tout, displaying his coins. "Let's put th' two pieces t'gether an' nail 'em f'r $50 each."
"On what?" inquired the shabby-looking man without any apparent interest whatsoever.
"On a pipe," said the red-haired tout. "Rolling Boer. He'll make 'em dizzy and stroll in with his head a-swingin' an' his tail a-swishin'. Do you come in with me f'r the half?"
The shabby-looking man put his fifty-cent piece back in his left-hand waistcoat pocket.
"You'll be fallin' out o' bed in a minute, Red," said the shabby-looking man. "Not for me. I need the beers--ten of 'em."
"Yes, you're a sport right, I think nix," said the red-haired tout, walking gloomily away. "You're a dead game, with the copper on."
His eagle eye caught sight of a fat man with some three parts of a jag sitting at the "dope" table, alternately puffing at a ravelled cigar and nodding sleepily. This jagged man had on one side of his head a straw hat that looked as if it had been rained on and then sat on. The red-haired tout went over to him.
"Say, your lid's on the pork all right, ain't it?" he said amiably to the jagged man. "Been scrappin' with a cable-car?"
"Fade away--fade away," said the jagged man, sleepily. "Do a disappearing stunt."
"I'll tell you what I'll do with you," said the red-haired tout, edging over confidentially to the jagged man. "I'll pass you this cage o' mine--on'y bought it three days ago, and coughed a two-spot f'r it--f'r that one o' yours an' half a buck t' boot," and the red-haired tout removed the pretty fair-looking straw hat he was wearing and pushed it over to the jagged man. The jagged man took his ravelled cigar from his mouth and grinned broadly.
"Say," he said to the red-haired tout, "you gimme th' tizzy-wizzy--hones' yo do. Me wear a No. 2 lid? Say, do your fadin' stunt--fade away."
The tout picked up his hat, put it on, and walked away.
"Now they've hammered Rolling Boer down to 80 to 1, hey?" he said, looking up at the second line of betting. "B'jee, I'd climb a porch t' yank out a couple t' put on that one."
He was disconsolately biting his nails and looking around to see if there was any way out for him before the bunch of two-year-olds at Gravesend went to the post.
"They're at the pump at Gravesend!" announced the board-marker.
Just as the announcement was made, a little man with a straw-colored mustache and a red, white and blue band around his straw hat mounted the stairs, passed the spotter sitting at the door with a nod, lit a fresh cigarette, and walked up behind the red-haired tout.
"Thay, Red," he said, "what'th good in thith?"
The red-haired tout wheeled like a man who's been touched on the shoulder by a deputy sheriff.
"You haven't got a minute!" he said, rapidly, to the little man with the straw-colored mustache. "It's th' baby o' th' year! Gimme three aces--two f'r you, an' one f'r me, an' in four minutes from date you'll be lookin' over th' sides of a balloon, chucking off ballast made out o' money."
The lisping little man with the straw-colored mustache smiled indulgently and pulled out a roll, from which he stripped a five-dollar note.
"That'th the thmalletht I've got, Red," he said, handing over the note to the tout. "Thay"----
He chopped off the question, however, for the tout made two bounds for the money-taker's window.
"Three on Rolling Boer, T. L. M.!" he shouted, giving the initials of the little man with the straw-colored mustache. "Th' other two on th' same, just plain R-e-d, Red, and both bets straight."
The man behind the desk grinned.
"High-ball mazuma for the house, Red," he said, twisting his mustache. "That one ain't got a look-in."
The tout was back at the side of the little man with the straw-colored mustache who believed in him just as the operator sung out: "Off at Gravesend!"
"Thay, Red," said the tout's little man, "which one of 'em did you put thothe five"----
"Rolling Boer at the quarter by a head!" sang out the operator.
"On that one!" said the red-haired tout, giving his thigh a whack with his bundle of "dope" books. "It's a pleasant outing for that one! He'll"----
"Rolling Boer in the stretch by a nose!" called out the operator.
"Thay, he'll curl up, won't he, Red?" said the little man at the tout's side, nervously. "Did you play him straight or one, two, three"----
"Rolling Boer wins by a nose!" shouted the operator.
It was a bit too much for the red-haired tout. He didn't have any words handy. So he slammed his "dope" books down on a chair, pitched forward, turned a cart wheel, and then walked around the room on his hands with his coat hanging over his head, and a grin of indescribable happiness all over his freckled features. The little man with the straw-colored mustache who had believed in Red followed the tout about the room.
"Thay, what do we win, Red?" he asked. "What prithe wath that horth?"
"You yank out $240, an' mine's $160," said the red-haired tout, getting on his feet again.
"Thay, Red, you're all right," said the red-haired tout's benefactor, pumping him by both hands.
The two flashy-looking chaps who had first been tackled by the tout on the Rolling Boer proposition now walked up behind him with long faces.
"Say, Red, why didn't you pitch that at us a little stronger, hey?"
"Get t'ell away from me, you pikers!" was the red-haired tout's reply.
HE "COPPERED" HIS WIFE'S "HUNCHES."
_Wherein It Is Shown That the Feminine Intuition Is Liable to Occasionally Slip a Cog._
"Yes, siree," said the man with the ravelled cigar and the granulated eyelids who swung precariously from a strap in a car of a returning Sheepshead Bay train the other evening, "it certainly is funny about these here hunches that women have, ain't it?"
"No," said the two seated men he was addressing.
"Certainly is queer what freaky ideas they get into their heads," went on the man with the ravelled cigar, ignoring the lack of encouragement extended to him. "And when it comes to picking out good things on a race-track, picking 'em out just on hunch, ain't they wonders, hey?"
"Nope," said the two men at whom he was directing his conversation.
"It sure beats the Painted Post Silver Cornet Band how they can stick a pin in a program with their eyes shut and light on a 100 to 1 shot that wins a-blinking," continued the man with the granulated eyelids, tearing two or three superfluous wrappers off his ravelled cigar. "Their system beats the dope and the handicapping all to shucks, don't it?"
"Nix," replied the two men in the seat.
"Never had such chance to size up the feminine hunch as I did out at Morris Park 'bout six or seven years ago," went on the man with the eccentric cigar. "Told my wife one night during the fall meeting at the park that I was going to the races the next day, that a shoe clerk I knew had told me about a good thing that was going to happen--he'd got it from a trainer to whom he'd sold a pair of shoes--and I was going after some of it.
"'Theophilus Nextdoor,' says she to me, 'how dare you deliberately tell me that you are going to gamble your money away, when I haven't a rag to my back and the coal not yet put in!'
"'Can't help it, Clarissa,' says I, 'I've just naturally got to invest $50 on this good thing. I know it ain't right, but I've got to do it, anyhow.'
"Then she let out on me, and we both got mad. I tried to square it up with her the next morning, and at the breakfast table I read her the names of the horses that were going to run in the race in which I had the good thing the shoe clerk had given me. When I came to the name of a horse called Jodan, she dropped her coffee cup with a clatter and stared at me.
"'Jodan,' said she. Isn't that short for Joseph Daniel?'
"'Yes'm, I guess so,' I said, not knowing whether it was or not, but anxious to stroke her the right way.
"'Is that the horse you are going to invest your money on?' she asked me, breathlessly.
"'No, it's another one,' said I.
"'Well, you might just as well stay home, then,' said she, positively. 'You'll lose your money. Jodan will win. I dreamt all night last night of my Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy, who was lost at sea when I was a little bit of a thing, and if Jodan is short for Joseph Daniel, as it must be, then Jodan will win.'
"'But that's plain superstition, and races ain't won that way,' I said to her.
"'I don't care one bit, so I don't,' she said to me. 'You will simply be throwing your money away, and I need so many things, if you invest it on any other horse than Jodan.'
"I tried to argue with her, but it was no go. She told me that her lost Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy had once won a full-rigged ship race from Shanghai to Boston, and was a pretty speedy old cuss in more ways than one, and that any horse named after her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy couldn't lose. I told her that, while I didn't know anything about this Jodan horse, I didn't think he could beat the good thing my shoe-clerk friend had given me, but she wouldn't listen to me. The last thing she said to me before I left the house was:
"'If you are determined to be a horrid, vulgar, disgraceful gambler, you play Jodan. You'll be sorry if you don't.'
"Stubborn, when they get an idea into their heads, women, ain't they?"
"No," said the two men in the seat near the strap-clutching man with the ravelled cigar.
"Well, by jing, I got to thinking about my wife's queer hunch on that Jodan horse on my way out to the track, and the more I thought about it the weaker I became on that good thing my shoe-clerk friend had given me.
"'Women have got something away ahead of sense or reason,' says I to myself on the train on the way out, 'and I sure would feel almighty cheap and no-account if my wife happened to be right about her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy and this Jodan horse. I sure would. I've got a good mind to put a little money on that Jodan horse anyhow, derned if I haven't.'
"I was still undecided about it when I got out to the track. That's the edge the bookmakers have got, ain't it--the people that have real good things and then wabble when it comes to sticking to them?"
"Nope," said the two men in the seat.
"Well, sir, when the prices were marked up for that race in which I had the good thing, blamed if Jodan wasn't chalked up at 100 to 1. My good thing horse was the second choice at 5 to 1. I stood there looking at the prices, getting pulled around and butted into, and I had the dingedest time making up my mind what I was going to do that you ever heard of in your life.
"'If my wife's hunch is right,' I thought, 'and that Jodan horse wins at 100 to 1 without my playing him, I'll never hear the last of it as long's I'm on top of the ground. She'll be telling me morning, noon and night, that she gave me a chance to win $5000, and that I didn't have enough gumption to take it. And if the good thing my shoe-clerk friend gave me wins at 5 to 1, I'll be sore on myself for throwing away a chance to pick up $250 if I don't play it.'
"I walked out onto the lawn so's I could have more room to make up my mind. Then I wheeled around suddenly and dived into the betting ring.
"'By cracky!' says I to myself, 'I'm doing this little gamble myself, and, feminine hunch or no hunch, I'm going to play that good thing my shoe-clerk friend gave me, and nothing else.'
"So I went to the first bookmaker I saw and got a $250 to $50 ticket on my good thing."
Here the man with the granulated lids sighed heavily and looked genuinely distressed.
"Say, it's the dickens, ain't it," he said, after a pause, "how these things happen?"
The two men in the seat to whom he had been addressing his conversation exhibited a certain suppressed interest as to the outcome.
"Of course Jodan just walked in that day, at 100 to 1?" said one of them finally, with a grin that clearly indicated his belief that he had the result discounted.
The man with a ravelled cigar struck a match and lit the same for the eighteenth time.
"Not on your zinc wedding did Jodan walk in!" he said, puffing away without removing his eyes from the match. "My good thing spread-eagled 'em from the jump, and won, pulled up, by eight lengths. Jodan was last. It sure is odd about these feminine hunches, ain't it?"
"Blamed if it ain't," said one of the men in the seat.
"I carried a twelve-pound lobster home to my wife that night and told her it was a fair replica of her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy horse, and she told me that she just wouldn't believe that Jodan hadn't won until she saw the paper the next morning, so there now! She caved, though, when I uncovered the $250 and told her that she couldn't get that cerise-silk-lined tailor-made dress quick enough to suit me, and she said that she might have known that no horse named after her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy, who didn't have any more luck than to go and get himself lost at sea, could win anything.
"Well, a month or so after that I went down to Washington on a little matter of business, and took my wife along with me. There was horse racing going on near Washington then, at a track called St. Asaph, across the Potomac in Virginia.
"'Clarissa,' said I to my wife one morning, after I'd got all through with my business in Washington and was ready to come back to New York, 'I think we'd better stay over to-day and go to the races at St. Asaph. A man that I met in the shooting gallery down the street gave me a good thing last night, and I think I ought to see to it. It's going to come off to-day.'
"Of course she told me again that I was going to rack and ruin, and never would make anything of myself, but I told her that I just naturally had to go over to St. Asaph that day and play Jodan.
"'Jodan!' she almost screamed at me. 'Theophilus Nextdoor, how can you have the hardihood to stand there and tell me that you are going to waste your money on that horrid beast, when both of us are absolutely in need of new fall outfits?'
"I told her that I'd see to the fall outfits, but that I sure couldn't get away from that Jodan good thing.
"'Why,' I said, don't you remember how wild you were about this same Jodan horse only a little more than a month ago?'
"'I just don't care one bit if I was,' she replied. 'I know and you know that any horse named after my Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy, who didn't have any more luck than to go and get himself lost at sea, cannot win, and I should think you would be ashamed of yourself to stand there and tell me to my face,' etc., etc.
"Well, she wouldn't go along with me to the track over at St. Asaph across the Potomac, and so I went alone. The man I had met in the shooting gallery had told me so earnestly about this Jodan horse that I couldn't fail to be impressed by his words, and when I found that my wife was so opposed to Jodan's chances was more than ever determined to play him, for I'd learned something about the nature of the feminine hunch, don't you see?
"It like to've carried me off my feet when I saw the price on the blackboards against Jodan. Jodan was quoted at 150 to 1. The favorite was at 3 to 5 on, and all of 'em, the whole fourteen in the race, were at shorter prices than Jodan. I clutched the $50 that I had intended playing on Jodan, thinking that he'd be about 10 to 1 or something like that, and I just thought and thought and thought over the thing.
"'By jimminy!' said I finally, after standing over in a corner alone for a while, thinking, 'my wife may be right about Jodan, and all that, but I came over here to play Jodan, and I'm going to play him or just bust, win or lose!'
"Then I went over to a bookmaker, got a $1500 to $10 ticket on Jodan to win. 'Take that hay out of your hair, pal,' the bookmaker said to me when I passed my money over--and went up to the stand to see the race, thinking all the time what a serious matter it is to take a chance on playing against the feminine hunch.
"Jodan, after being practically left at the post, came out of the clouds in the stretch, and won the derned old race on the wire by a nose from the favorite, and when I hired a rig and packed those $1500 over to my wife the way she warmed up to her one and only Theophilus was sure a caution.
"The feminine hunch," concluded the man with the ravelled cigar and the granulated eyelids, "is all right when you copper it, but it won't do to play it open. Am I right?"
"No," said the two men in the seat, and then the rush to get off the train began.
A RACE HORSE THAT PAID A CHURCH DEBT.
_He Was Thought to Be a No-Account Cripple, but He Proved Himself to Be "All Horse" When Called Upon._
"A friend of mine who came here from Chicago for the Bennings meeting was telling me about that Jim McCleevy mule," said an old-time owner of thoroughbreds who is wintering a string of jumpers and breaking a bunch of yearlings out at the Bennings track. "That makes a queer story, and there are some strange things connected with the thoroughbred game, at that. This McCleevy horse wasn't worth a bag of moist peanuts at the beginning of the present racing season. He couldn't beat a fat man. He had never been in the money. He was a legitimate thousand-to-one shot in any company. He was the candidate for the shafts of a brick cart, when by some odd chance he passed into the possession of a nice young woman who was going to school somewhere in the State of Iowa. The girl's uncle was mixed up some way or another with the turf, and he bought the McCleevy plug for a joke, paying a few dollars for him. In a spirit of fun he wrote to his niece that he had bought Jim McCleevy in her name, and that the horse belonged to her and would be run in her interest. The young woman didn't know the difference between a race-horse and a chatelaine bag. She was an orphan, and struggling to get an education for herself. Her ambition was to take a course at a woman's college, but, up to the time of this incident, which lasted throughout the spring and summer, her hope of putting this ambition over the plate was pretty shadowy, and it looked like it was up to her to get a job teaching a country school in order to support herself. But she wrote to her uncle that she accepted the gift of the no-account racer with gratitude, and inquired if the horse could not trot right fast, for, if so, she might be able to dispose of him to some well-to-do farmer in her neighborhood.
"Jim McCleevy was attached to the string of a good trainer, who saw at once that the horse had been underestimated, that he had been badly handled, and that it would be worth the effort to try to make something of him. He spent two or three weeks monkeying with the skate and fixing him up, and then he sent him out one morning with a lummux of a stable boy on his back and put the watch on him. Jim McCleevy breezed a mile in 1:44, fighting for his head at the finish, and two days later he was slapped into a selling race at a mile and a sixteenth, with light weight, a bum apprentice lad up, and all kinds of a price, for there were some good ones in the race, which was at the Harlem track, in Chicago. The girl's uncle scattered a few dollars around the ring on the mutt, all three ways, and McCleevy came home on the bit. That was the beginning of McCleevy. He was put into a couple of races a week at a mile and more, at the Harlem and Hawthorne tracks, during the entire racing season at Chicago, and he won race after race, no matter how they piled the weight penalties up on him. When he didn't win he broke into the money, and as there was always a good price on him, seeing that almost every time he raced he was pitted against horses that seemed to outclass him, the uncle of the girl who owned him got some of the money every time. He parleyed the money that he won for his niece on Jim McCleevy's first race, and he got it back and a bunch besides every time. The fame of Jim McCleevy spread around Chicago, and a Chicago newspaper man went down to Iowa to interview the young woman who owned the horse. She told him, artlessly, that while she abhorred gambling--well, she certainly did enjoy the prospect of being enabled to complete her education. Her uncle deposited between $8000 and $9000 in her name, the amount he had won for her in purses and bets on Jim McCleevy, at the wind-up of the racing season, and the horse, which developed quite a bit of real class, still belongs to her.
"Odd, isn't it, that an underestimated race-horse should hop out and not only give a nice girl that had never so much as has stroked his sleek neck a chance to fulfil her ambition for an education, but win her a start in life that'll probably make her one of the eligible girls in the State of Iowa? But I recall a queerer one than that--how a cast-off crab suddenly developed into a race-horse and paid off a mortgage on a church.
"That happened out at Latonia four years ago. I was racing a few of my own out there at the time, and saw the affair from the beginning to the wind-up. I'll have to duck giving the names, for the good man who profited by the sudden development of the nag he accidentally became possessed of is still the pastor of a flock that congregates in a pretty little debt-free, brick and stone Roman Catholic church on the outskirts of Cincinnati.
"There was an old trainer hanging around the Latonia barns at that time who was in hard luck from a whole lot of different points of view. I'd known him on the metropolitan tracks years before, and he had been, in his day of prosperity, a good fellow and a horse-wise man, if ever one chewed a straw. When his health went back on him, however, six or seven years ago, and he couldn't personally attend to his work--he ran an open training stable--it was all off with him. The strings that he had been handling were taken away from him by the owners and put in other hands, and he went up against the day of adversity with a rattle. He had a few horses of his own, but these proved worthless, and most of them were finally taken away from him to pay feed bills. On top of it all he developed locomotor ataxia, and when I got out to the Latonia barns, four years ago, he could barely move around. How he contrived to exist I don't know, but I guess the boys chipped in a dollar or so every once in a while for the old man. The only horse that he had left when I reached Latonia with my little bunch was an old six-year-old gelding that was a joke. Well, call him Caspar. The mention of Caspar's name made even the stable-boy grin. Caspar looked a good deal like Diggs, that camel horse that's pulling down the purses now in New Orleans. He was all out of shape, with a pair of knees on him each as big as your hat; of all the bunged up, soured, chalky old skates that ever I looked over, this Caspar gelding was the limit. Yet he had been a pretty good two-year-old and a more than fair three-year-old. He had won four races as a two-year-old, and six as a three-year-old, but he was campaigned and drummed a heap, and when the old man shot him as a four-year-old Caspar could just walk, and that's all. He was a cripple from every point of the compass. He was chronically sour and sore, and he was as vicious and ugly as the devil, into the bargain. He never got anywhere near the money as a four and five-year-old, and he hadn't been raced at all as a six-year-old, when I first clapped an eye on his rheumatic old shape. But the old man was a sentimentalist in his way, and he couldn't stand the idea of selling a horse that he had taken care of as a baby to some truck driver to be overworked and abused. So he hung on to Caspar, fed him, nursed him and took care of him generally, just as if the old plug was making good for all of this attention. Caspar was a standing gag around the Latonia stables.
"'Wait'll I joggle Caspar under the string by four lengths in the Kentucky Derby!' a monkey-faced apprentice jockey would say solemnly to the other kids, and then they'd all holler.