Chapter 6

Porter's trust that his ill luck had been changed by a win was a faith of short life, for Diablo was most emphatically beaten in his race.

And then came the day of forlorn hope, the day of Lauzanne's disgrace, inasmuch as it de-graduated him into the selling-platter class.

Bad horse as Langdon knew Lauzanne to be, it occurred to him that Porter had planned a clever coup. He had an interview with Crane over the subject, but his master did not at all share the Trainer's belief.

“What price would Lucretia, or The Dutchman, be in with the same lot?” Langdon asked, argumentatively.

“About one to ten,” Crane replied. “But the Chestnut's beating them had no bearing on this race. From what I see of Mr. Dixon, I don't at all class him with you as a trainer--he hasn't the same resource.”

Langdon stood silent, sullenly turning over in his mind this doubtful compliment.

“I'm not sure,” continued the Banker, “but that having stuck Porter with Lauzanne, you shouldn't give him a hint about--well, as to what course of preparation would make Lauzanne win a race for him. The ordinary diet of oats is hardly stimulating enough for such a sluggish animal.”

Langdon frowned. If Crane had not been quite so strong, quite so full of unexpressed power, he would have rebelled at the assertion that he had stuck Porter; but he answered, and his voice struggled between asperity and deprecation, “There ain't no call for me to give that stable any pointers; Porter put it to me pretty straight that the horse had been helped.”

“And what did you say?” blandly inquired Crane.

“Told him to go to hell.”

This wasn't exactly truthful as we remember the interview, but its terseness appealed to Crane, and he smiled as he said: “Porter probably won't take your advice, Langdon; he's stubborn enough at times. And even if he does know that--that--Lauzanne' requires special treatment, he won't indulge him--he's got a lot of old-fashioned ideas about racing. So you see Lauzanne is a bad betting proposition.”

After Langdon had left Crane's thoughts dwelt on the subject they had just discussed.

“From a backer's point of view Lauzanne is certainly bad business,” he mused; “but the public will reason just as Langdon does. And what's bad for the backers is good for the layers; I must see Faust.”

“You had better make a book to beat Lauzanne,” Crane said to Jakey Faust, just before business had commenced in the ring that afternoon.

The Cherub stared in astonishment; his eyes opened wide. That was nearly the limit of his fat little face's expression, no matter what the occasion.

“You don't own him now, do you, sir?” he blurted out, with unthinking candor.

“I do not.”

“He's dropped into a soft spot--he rates best in the percentage card.”

“Figures sometimes lie,” commented Crane.

“Every handicapper tips him to win.”

“They're all broke because of their knowledge.”

“The books'll mark him up first choice.”

“That's why it will be worth while playing the field to beat him.”

“He's in with a gang of muts to-day, an' he beat some cracker-jacks last time out.”

“You were hypnotized that day, Mr. Faust; so was the Judge. Lauzanne didn't beat anything.”

“Didn't beat--what the hell--didn't the Chestnut get the verdict?”

“He did; but--” and Crane looked at Faust, with patient toleration of his lack of perception.

The Cherub waited for an explanation of these contradictory remarks. But he might have waited indefinitely--Crane had quite finished. The Cherub raised his little round eyes, that were like glass alleys, green and red and blue-streaked, to the other's face inquiringly, and encountered a pair of penetrating orbs peering at him over some sort of a mask--the face that sustained the eyes was certainly a mask--as expressionless. Then it came to Jakey Faust that there was nothing left to do but fill the Lauzanne column in his book with the many bets that would come his way and make much money.

Crane watched Lauzanne go lazily, sluggishly down to the post for his race. He knew the horse's moods; the walk of the Chestnut was the indifferent stroll of a horse that is thinking only of his dinner.

“They've given him nothing,” the Banker muttered to himself; “the heavy-headed brute won't try a yard. But he'll fight the boy when he tries to ride him out.”

The whisky that Dixon had surreptitiously given Lauzanne had been as inefficacious as so much ginger beer; and in the race Lauzanne drew back out of the bustle and clash of the striving horses as quickly as he could. In vain his jockey used whip and spur; Lauzanne simply put his ears back, switched his tail, and loafed along, a dozen lengths behind his field.

In the straight he made up a little of the lost ground, but he was securely out of the money at the finish. Fate still sat and threw the dice as he had for many moons--a deuce for John Porter, and a six for Philip Crane.

VIII

It was late autumn; the legitimate racing season had closed. In August Porter had taken his horses back to Ringwood for the winter.

When a man strives against Fate, when realization laughs mockingly at his expectations, there comes to him a time when he longs for a breathing spell, when he knows that he must rest, and wait until the wheel of life, slow-turning, has passed a little through the groove of his existence. John Porter had been beaten down at every point. Disastrous years come to all men, whether they race horses or point the truthful way, and this year had been but a series of disappointments to the master of Ringwood. After Lucretia's win in the Eclipse, Porter did not land another race. Lucretia caught cold and went off. He tried Lauzanne twice again, but the Chestnut seemed thoroughly soured. Now he was back at Ringwood, a dark cloud of indebtedness hanging over the beautiful place, and prospect of relief very shadowy. If Lucretia wintered well and grew big and strong she might extricate him from his difficulties by winning one or two of the big races the following summer. About any of the other horses there was not even this much of promise.

Thoroughly distrusting Lauzanne, embittered by his cowardice, Porter had given him away--but to Allis. Strangely enough, the girl had taken a strong liking to the son of Lazzarone; it may have been because of the feeling that she was indirectly responsible for his presence at Ringwood. Allis Porter's perceptions had been developed to an extraordinary degree. All her life she had lived surrounded by thoroughbreds, and her sensitive nature went out to them, in their courage and loyalty, in a manner quite beyond possibility in a practical, routine-following horseman. To her they were almost human; the play of their minds was as attractive and interesting as the development of their muscles was to a trainer. When the stable had been taken back to Ringwood, she had asked for Lauzanne as a riding horse.

“I'm going to give him away,” her father had replied; “I can't sell him--nobody would buy a brute with such a reputation.” This word brought to Porter's mind his chief cause of resentment against the Chestnut. The public having got into its head that Porter was playing coups, generously suggested that he was pulling Lauzanne to get him in some big handicap light.

“I won't feed such a skate all winter,” he declared angrily, after a little pause.

“Well, give him to me, father,” the girl had pleaded; “I am certain that he'll make good some day; you'll see that he'll pay you for keeping your word.”

As Allis rode Lauzanne she discovered many things about the horse; that instead of being a stupid, morose brute, his intelligence was extraordinary, and, with her at least, his temper perfect.

Allis's relationship with her father was unusual. They were chums; in all his trouble, in all his moments of wavering, buffeted by the waves of disaster, Allis was the one who cheered him, who regirt him in his armor:--Allis, the slight olive-faced little woman, with the big, fearless Joan-of-Arc eyes.

“You'll see what we'll do next summer, Dad,” she said cheerily. “You'll win with Lucretia as often as you did with her mother; and I'll win with Lauzanne. We'll just keep quiet till spring, then we'll show them.”

Langdon's horses, so silently controlled by Philip Crane, Banker, had been put in winter quarters at Gravesend, where Langdon had a cottage. Crane's racing season had been as successful as the Master of Ringwood's had been disastrous. He had won a fair-class race with The Dutchman--ostensibly Langdon's horse--and then, holding true to his nature, which was to hasten slowly, threw him out of training and deliberately planned a big coup for the next year. The colt was engaged in several three-year-old stakes, and Crane set Langdon to work to find out his capabilities. As his owner expected, he showed them in a severe trial gallop the true Hanover staying-power.

Although Crane had said nothing about it at the time, he had his eye on the Eastern Derby when he commissioned Langdon to purchase this gallant son of Hanover. It was a long way ahead to look, to lay plans to win a race the following June, but that was the essence of Crane's existence, careful planning. He loved it. He was a master at it. And, after all, given a good stayer, such as he had in The Dutchman, the mile-and-a-half run of the Derby left less to chance than any other stake he could have pitched upon; the result would depend absolutely upon the class and stamina of the horses. No bad start could upset his calculations, no little interference in the race could destroy his horse's chance if he were good enough to win. The Dutchman's races as a two-year-old would not warrant his being made a favorite, and Langdon, properly directed, was clever enough to see that The Dutchman was at a comfortable price for betting purposes.

Many things had crowded into this year of Crane's life. The bank, doing but a modest business always, was running so smoothly that it required little attention from the owner. This was one reason why he had thrown so much subtle energy into his racing; its speculation appealed to him. The plucking he had received as a moneyed youth rankled in his heart. The possession of such a faithful jackal as Langdon carried him to greater lengths than he would have gone had the obnoxious details been subject to his own execution. Though conscienceless, he was more or less fastidious. Had a horse broken down and become utterly useless, he would have ordered him to be destroyed without experiencing any feeling of compassion--he would have dismissed the matter entirely from his mind with the passing of the command; but rather than destroy the horse himself, he probably would have fed him. And so it was with men. If they were driven to the wall because of his plans, that was their own look out; it did not trouble Philip Crane.

Porter he had known simply in a business way. From the first he had felt that Ringwood would pass out of its owner's possession, and he had begun to covet it. The Lauzanne race had been Langdon's planning altogether. Crane, cold-blooded as he was, would not have robbed a man he had business dealings with deliberately. He had told his trainer to win, if possible, a race with Lauzanne, and get rid of him. That Langdon's villainous scheme had borne evil fruit for John Porter was purely a matter of chance selection. There was a Mephistophelean restitution in not striving to wrest the Eclipse from Lucretia with The Dutchman.

And now, in this year, had come the entirely new experience of an affection--his admiration for Allis Porter. It conflicted with every other emotion that governed his being. All his life he had been selfish--considering only Philip Crane, his mind unharrassed by anything but business obstacles in his ambitious career. Love for this quiet, self-contained girl, unadorned by anything but the truth, and honesty, and fearlessness that were in her big steadfast eyes, had come upon him suddenly and with an assertive force that completely mastered him. By a mere chance he had heard Allis give her recitation, “The Run of Crusader,” in the little church at Brookfield. Crane was not an agnostic, but he had interested himself little in church matters; and the Reverend Dolman's concert, that was meant to top down many weeds of debt that were choking the church, had claimed him simply because an evening in Brookfield had come to hang heavily on his hands. Now when the Reverend Dolman received Philip Crane's check for fifty dollars the next day, to be applied to the church encumbrance, he sought to allay his surprise by attributing the gift to his own special pleading that evening, of course backed up by Providence. If anybody had stated that the mainspring of the gift had been the wicked horse-racing poem of their denunciation he would have been scandalized and full of righteous disbelief. It is quite likely that even Crane would have denied that Allis's poem had inspired him to the check; but nevertheless it had.

The world of feeling and sympathy and goodness that had hung in her voice had set a new window in his soul slightly ajar--so slightly ajar that even now, months afterward, the lovelight was only beginning to stream through. When love comes to a man at forty he is apt to play the game very badly indeed; he turns it into a very anxious business, and moves through the light-tripping measure with the pedantic dignity of a minuet dancer. But Philip Crane was not given to making mistakes; he knew that, like Crusader, “His best racing days (in the love stakes) were over”--especially where the woman was but a girl. So he sat down and planned it all out as he planned to win the Brooklyn Derby months later. And all the time he was as sincerely in love as if he had blundered into many foolishness; but his love making was to be diplomatic. Even now all the gods of Fate stood ranged on his side; Allis's brother was in his bank, more or less dependent upon him; Ringwood itself was all but in the bank; he stood fairly well with John Porter, and much better with Allis's mother, for already he had begun to ingratitate himself with Mrs. Porter. He would cast from the shoulders of the Reverend Dolman a trifle more of the load he was carrying. He would send the reverend gentleman another check.

Why he should think it necessary to prepare his suit with so much subtlety he hardly knew; in all reason he should be considered a fair match for Allis Porter. He was not a bad man as the world understood him; he did not profess Christianity, but, on the other hand, his life was extremely respectable; he did not drink; he was not given to profane language; even in racing his presence seemed to lend an air of respectability to the sport, and it was generally supposed that he raced purely for relaxation. In truth, it seemed to him that his marriage with Allis would be a deuced good thing for the Porters.

In actuality there were just two things that stood in the way--two things which his position and wealth could not obviate--his age, and the Porter pride. If Porter had not been dubbed “Honest John” early in life, he might have been saddled with “Proud Porter” later on. The pride had come up out of old Kentucky with all the other useless things--the horse-racing, and the inability to make money, and the fancy for keeping a promise. Something whispered to Crane that Allis would never come to him simply out of love; it might be regard, esteem, a desire to please her parents, a bowing to the evident decree of fate. Perhaps even the very difficulty of conquest made Crane the more determined to win, and made him hasten slowly.

IX

As a rule few visitors went to Ringwood.

John Porter had been too interested in his horses and his home life to care much for social matters. Mrs. Porter was a home-body, too, caring nothing at all for society--at best there was but little of it in Brookfield--except where it was connected with church work. Perhaps that was one reason why Allis had grown so close into her father's life. It was a very small, self-contained household.

Mike Gaynor had become attached to the staff at Ringwood this winter as a sort of assistant trainer to Porter. Dixon only trained the Ringwood horses during the racing season, Porter always supervising them in winter quarters. Perhaps it was Porter's great cloud of evil fortune which had cast its sinister influence over Mike because of his sympathy for the master of Ringwood; certain it is that the autumn found him quite “on his uppers,” as he graphically described his financial standing. An arrangement was made by which Mike's disconsolate horses were fed at Ringwood, and he took care of both strings. This delighted Allis, for she had full confidence in Gaynor's integrity and good sense.

The early winter brought two visitors to Ringwood--Crane, who came quite often, and Mortimer, who went out to the farm a couple of times with Alan.

George Mortimer might be described as an angular young man. His face, large-featured, square-jawed, and bold-topped by broad forehead, suggested the solemnity Alan had found so trying. Of course a young man of his make-up was sure to have notions, and Mortimer's mind was knotted with them; there seemed no soft nor smooth places in his timber. That was why he had reasoned with the butcher by energetically grasping his windpipe the evening that worthy gentleman had expressed himself so distastefully over Allis Porter's contribution to the Reverend Dolman's concert. Perhaps a young man of more subtle grace would have received some grateful recognition for this office, but the matter had been quite closed out so far as Mortimer was concerned; Alan tried to refer to it afterward, but had been curtly stopped.

George Mortimer's chief notion was that work was a great thing, seemingly the chief end of man. Another notion almost equally prominent--he had derived it from his mother--was, that all forms of gambling were extremely bad business. First and foremost in this interdiction stood horse racing. The touch of it that hung like a small cloud over the Brookfield horizon had inspired Mrs. Mortimer, as it had other good people of the surrounding country, with the restricted idea that those who had to do with thoroughbred horses were simply gamblers--betting people. Her home was in Emerson, a dozen miles from Brookfield.

Quite paradoxically, if Allis Porter had not given “The Run of Crusader”--most certainly a racing poem--in the little church, this angular young man with stringent ideas about running horses probably would have never visited Ringwood. Something of the wide sympathy that emanated from her as she told of the gallant horse's death struck into his strong nature, and there commenced to creep into his thoughts at odd intervals a sort of gratuitous pity that she should be inextricably mixed up with race horses. His original honesty of thought and the narrowness of his tuition were apt to make him egotistically sure that the things which appealed to him as being right were incapable of variation.

At first he had liked Alan Porter, with no tremendous amount of unbending; now, because of the interest Allis had excited in him, the liking began to take on a supervisory form, and it was not without a touch of irritation in his voice that Alan informed his sister that he had acquired a second father, and with juvenile malignity attributed the incumbrance to her seductive influence.

With all these cross purposes at work it can be readily understood that Mortimer's visits to Ringwood were not exactly rose-leaved. In truth, the actors were all too conventionally honest, too unsocialized, to subvert their underlying motives. Allis, with her fine intuition, would have unearthed Mortimer's disapprobation of racing--though he awkwardly strove to hide it--even if Alan had not enlarged upon this point. This knowledge constrained the girl, even drove her into rebellion. She took his misunderstanding as a fault, almost as a weakness, and shocked the young man with carefully prepared racing expressions; reveled with strange abandon in talks of gallops, and trials, and work-outs, and breathers; threw ironmouthed horses, pullers, skates, and divers other equine wonders at his head until he revolted in sullen irritation. In fact they misunderstood each other finely; in truth their different natures were more in harmony two miles apart, the distance that lay between the bank and Ringwood.

By comparison Crane's visits to Ringwood were utopianly complacent. Strangely enough, Mrs. Porter, opposed to racing as she was, came quite readily under the glamor of his artistic unobtrusiveness. He had complete mastery over the science of waiting. His admission to the good lady of a passing interest in horses was an apology; there seemed such an utter absence of the betting spirit that the recreation it afforded him condoned the offense.

There was this difference between the two men, the old and the young: Crane knew exactly why he went there, while Mortimer had asked himself more than once, coming back from Ringwood feeling that he had been misunderstood--perhaps even laughed at--why he had gone there at all. He had no definite plan, even desire; he was impelled to it out of some unrecognized force. It was because of these conditions that the one potter turned his images so perfectly, and the other formed only poor, distorted, often broken, dishes of inferior clay.

It stood in the reason of things, however, that Mortimer, in spite of his uncompromising attitude toward racing, should be touched by its tentacles if he visited at Ringwood.

His first baptism came with much precipitancy on the occasion of his fourth visit to the Porters. He had driven out with Alan to spend his Saturday afternoon at Ringwood. An afternoon is not exactly like an evening in the matter of entertaining a guest; something must be done; cigars, or music, or small chatter are insufficient. If one is on the western slope of life's Sierra perhaps a nap may kill the time profitably enough, but this was a case where a young man had to be entertained, a young man difficult of entertainment under the circumstances.

Alan had some barbarous expedition of juvenile interest on hand; the unearthing of a woodchuck, or it might have been a groundhog, in a back field; but Allis would not become a party to the destruction of animal life for the sport of the thing. She had a much better programme mapped out for Mortimer. Some way she felt that if he could see the thoroughbred horses in their stalls, could come to know them individually, casually though it might be, he would perhaps catch a glimmer of their beautiful characters. So she asked Mr. Mortimer to go and have a look at her pets. Alan would none of it; he was off to his woodchuck or groundhog.

“I'm glad you don't want to go and kill anything,” she said, turning gratefully to Mortimer when he refused Alan's invitation, saying that he preferred to look at the horses. “I'll show you Diablo, and Lucretia, and Lauzanne the Despised--he's my horse, and I'm to win a big race with him next year. Gaynor is down at the stables; and I'll give you a tip”--Mortimer winced--“if you want to stand well in with Mike, let him suspect that you're fond of horses.”

At the stable door they met Mike Gaynor. Mike usually vacillated between a condition of chronic anger at somebody or something, and an Irish drollery that made people who were sick at heart laugh. Allis was as familiar with his moods as she was with the phases of Lauzanne's temper. On Mike's face was a map of disaster; the disaster might be trivial or great. That something was wrong the girl knew, but whether it was that a valuable horse was dead, or that a mouse had eaten a hole in a grain bag she could only discover by questioning Gaynor, for there were never degrees of expressed emotion in Mike's facile countenance; either a deep scowl or a broad grin were the two normal conditions.