BY

CLARENCE L. CULLEN

AUTHOR OF

"Tales OF THE EX-TANKS."

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1898-1899-1900, By

THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.

Copyright, 1900, By

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY.

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CONTENTS

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[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.]

To the man who, at any period of his days, has been bitten by that ferocious and fever-producing insect colloquially known as the "horse bug," and likewise to the man whose nervous system has been racked by the depredations of the "poker microbe," these tales of the turf and of the green cloth are sympathetically dedicated. The thoroughbred running horse is a peculiar animal. While he is often beaten, the very wisest veterans of the turf have a favorite maxim to the effect that "The ponies can't be beat"—meaning the thoroughbred racers; which sounds paradoxical enough. Poker, too, is a mystifying affair, in that all men who play it appear, from their own statements, to lose at it persistently and perennially. There is surely something weird and uncanny about a game that numbers only losers among its devotees. However, poker-players are addicted to persiflage. The genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, blown-in-the-bottle pokerist rarely acknowledges that he is ahead of the game—until the day after.

These stories, which were originally printed in the columns of the New York Sun, belong largely to the eminent domain of strict truthfulness. If they do not serve to show that the "horse bug" and the "poker microbe" are good things to steer clear of, they will by no means have failed of their purpose; for the writer had nothing didactic in view in setting them down as he heard them.

Clarence Louis Cullen.

New York, Sept. 1, 1900.

[THIS WIRETAPPER WAS COLOR-BLIND.]

And His Visual Infirmity Cost Him $15,000 and His Reputation.

"I went down to New Orleans a couple of months ago to get a young fellow who was pretty badly wanted in my town for a two-months' campaign of highly successful check-kiting last summer," said a Pittsburg detective who dropped into New York on a hunt last week. "I got him all right, and he's now doing his three years. I found him to be a pretty decent sort of a young geezer, although a born crook. I don't remember ever having had such an entertaining traveling mate as he was on the trip up from New Orleans. Before we started I asked him if he was going to be good or if it would be necessary for me to put the bracelets on. He gave me an on-the-level look and said:

"'No, I don't think it will. But I pass it up to you. I don't want to throw you. All I ask is, don't give me too much of a chance if you keep the irons off of me. I wouldn't be jay enough to try a window-jumping stunt, but don't give me a show to make either one of the car doors. If you do I may have to give you a run for it.'

"Well, I could see that he would be all right without the cuffs, and so I didn't put 'em on him. He rode up with me in the sleeper all the way from New Orleans to Pittsburg—I let him do the sleeping, though, of course—and he had a drink when I did and played quarter ante when I did, and none of the rest of the passengers were any the wiser. He was a clinking good talker and he told me a lot of interesting stories of queer propositions that he had been up against. For instance, when we were running through the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, he turned to me and asked me where the blue grass was. I told him that the term blue grass was largely ornamental, and that, while the grass down there was no doubt high-grade and the limit as fodder for thoroughbreds, I thought it was mostly green, like the grass the world over.

"'Well, I'm blooming glad to hear you say that,' he replied. 'It proves that I'm not color blind on the whole gamut of colors, anyhow. If you'd said there really was blue grass in these fields we're running through, I'd have given myself up as a bad job in the matter of distinguishing colors. But as long as the grass is green like other grass—well, there's some hope for me.'

"'Color-blind, eh?' I asked him.

"'Yes, I guess I am, more or less,' he replied. 'I never knew it, though, until last spring, and it cost me $15,000 to find it out.'

"'Expensive information,' said I. 'How'd it happen?'

"'If you'll undertake to forget about it by the time we get to Pittsburg, I'll tell you,' he said. 'I was fooling around one of the big towns—one of the biggest towns on this side of the Mississippi—last spring, when I met up with a couple of wiretappers that got me interested. They were the real kind—not fake tappers who rope fellows into giving up coin just by showing 'em phony instruments in shady rooms, but professionals, who really knew how to tap the wires and pull down the money. They had been working together for some time, and when I happened to meet them they had just pulled off a swell hog-killing up in Toronto and had two or three thousand each in their clothes. They had only recently struck the big town, and, as they had never operated there before, they didn't have to do any sleuth dodging. Neither did I, although I was doing a bit of business in the check line occasionally, and was about a thousand to the good when I met them. We hitched up together, the three of us, for a drosky whirl, and then they told me that, while they made it a rule not to let outsiders into their game, they thought I was good enough to be admitted to a good thing that they were about to pull off.

"'One of the largest and best patronized of the poolrooms of the town was 'way on the outskirts of the city. The duck that runs it is worth close on to a million, and the ticket writers have instructions never to turn any man's money down, no matter how big the sum or how lead-pipey the cinch he appears to have. Lumps of $20,000 and $30,000 have frequently been taken out of that poolroom on single tickets, and it's one of the few poolrooms where track odds are given.

"'My two new pals had sized up the layout, and when I met them they already had things fixed to pull down a few comfortable wads. They had rented a vacant frame cottage about 300 yards across a big vacant lot from the poolroom, and, by a little night work—they were both practical wiremen, as well as expert telegraphers—had got the wire into a room on the second floor of the house all right. It was prairie land all around and slimly frequented territory, and they had no trouble in rigging up the wire paraphernalia, which they carried alongside a picket fence to the porch of the cottage, and thence upstairs. They had the thing all tested, and every dot and dash that reached the poolroom registered also in the second floor of that cottage.

"'One of the fellows had formerly worked in a poolroom himself and he had the race code down as pat as butter. They took me out to have a look at the layout, not because they wanted a dollar out of me, for they were on velvet, but simply because they both seemed to take a kind o' shine to me, and it surely looked good. I spent two or three afternoons in the second floor front room where the layout was fixed, and the chap who was expert with the racing code broke the report direct from the track a dozen times and sent it in himself, after having mastered the operator's style at the track end of the line, and the poolroom operator was never a bit the wiser. It was good, all right, that layout, and when they were all ready to begin work I was in on the play.

"'We decided to make the first killing on the day the Belmont Stakes were to be run for at Morris Park. I was against their starting it off on such a big stake event, especially as the race looked to be such a moral for Hamburg, but they said stake events were as good as selling races in their business, and so we had a little rehearsal and stood by. My end of the job was to happen in the poolroom. I was to locate there by a dust-covered window that looked out of the poolroom across the big vacant lot to the frame cottage where the layout was installed and wait for the signal. The signal was to be made by means of a handkerchief waved in the air by one of the fellows from the window. The color of the handkerchief was to tell the name of the winner. For instance, if Hamburg won a white handkerchief was to show at the second-story window; if Bowling Brook captured the stakes a yellow handkerchief was to be the signal, and so on. When I got the signal I was to put the money down on the winner, the tapper was to hold the result from the pool operator for five minutes to give me time to get the money down, and then I was just to wait for the poolroom operator to announce the race. It was the easiest thing in life, and it would have gone through with a rush, not only on that race, but on a whole lot of other ones later on, if I hadn't been color blind.

"'I was on hand in the poolroom on the afternoon that we were to do business and I put a few dollars down on the first races at Morris Park, just for the sake of getting the ticket writers used to my face and to avert suspicion. I had a pretty fair line on the horses in training then and I won two or three out of the bets that I played simply on form. The fourth race on the card was for the Belmont Stakes, and after the third race had been confirmed and the first line of betting came in on the stake race I lounged over to the dust-colored window and looked uninterested. But I had the tail of my eye on the window of that frame cottage all the time, nevertheless. I had $2,000 of my pals' money in my clothes and $1,000 of my own. I was a bit nervous, but I knew that I had a pipe, and I also knew that the poolroom people had mighty little show to get next. I had all kinds of a front on me then, and a $5,000 or even larger bet was, as I say, not so unusual in that poolroom as to scare 'em or cause 'em to become suspicious.

"'Well, the second line of betting came in, with Hamburg the natural favorite at 4 to 5 on in the betting, Bowling Brook 4 to 1 against and the rest at write-your-own-ticket figures. The poolroom took in thousands of dollars of Hamburg money, for nobody in the big crowd that surged about the poolroom could figure any other horse in the race to have a chance. I myself thought it was a sure thing for Hamburg, but I wasn't playing thinks, but cinches, and so I just stood at that window and waited for the signal. I was, I suppose, somewhat excited internally when I thought of the possibilities of the game, but nobody knew it. The poolroom operator announced, 'They're at the post at Morris Park,' and then I knew that 'ud be the last direct communication he'd have with Morris Park until after the running of the Belmont Stakes. I leaned there on that window, with one hand resting on my chin comfortably, waiting for the flutter of the handkerchief away across the vacant lot. The sun shone brilliantly, and the window of the frame cottage was in plain view, and I didn't figure it as among the possibilities that I could make a mistake.

"'Well, when the whole crowd in the poolroom had become sort o' mute with expectancy and the betting at the desk was almost over, I got the signal. It was the quickest flash in the world, a white handkerchief, as I was perfectly positive, nervously waved three times from the second-story window of the frame cottage. I didn't see my pal waving the handkerchief—only the flutter of the white handkerchief which announced that Hamburg had won. So, without any apparent excitement, but in the laziest kind of a way in the world, I just yawned, stretched my arms, and remarked to a few fellows standing nearby:

"'"What's the use of doping over the race. It's a pipe for Hamburg. I'm going up and put a couple of thousand on Hamburg."

"'So I walked up to the desk, passed over six $500 bills and said "Hamburg." The ticket writer took the money without any visible emotion and wrote me a ticket. Then I walked out among the crowd to hear the calling off of the race, which I knew would happen within three or four minutes.

"'"They're off for the Belmont," the operator shouted in about three minutes, and then said I to myself, "What an exercise gallop for Hamburg! What a dead easy way of picking up large pieces of money!"

"'I wasn't worried even a little bit when Bowling Brook was 'way in the lead in the stretch.

"'Hamburg's just laying in a soft spot right there, third, and when it comes to a drive, how cheap, he'll make a crab like Bowling Brook look!

"'Then the operator, after the ten seconds' delay following the announcement of the horses' positions in the stretch, called out:

"'"Bowling Brook wins!"

"'Say, I'm not an excitable kind of a duck, nor dead easy to keel over, but, on the level, my head went 'round and I had to grip hold of a chair top when I heard that announcement. I couldn't make it out. It seemed out of the question. I knew that my two pals hadn't dumped me, because hadn't I played $2,000 of their money? At first I thought the operator made a mistake, and I waited with a spark of hope for the confirmation of the race. The confirmation came in. Bowling Brook had walked in, and Hamburg had been disgracefully beaten.

"'An hour later I met my two pals downtown. They greeted me with grins, and held out their hands for the thousands.

"'"Thing didn't go through, did it?" I said to them. "Where was the mistake, anyhow? What was the white handkerchief—Hamburg's signal—waved for?"

"'They looked at me savagely. They were positive that I had tricked them—that I had really played Bowling Brook with the money and was holding it out on them.

"'"White handkerchief be blowed!" said the man that had given the signal, pulling a light yellow handkerchief from his pocket. "What color do you call this?"

"'Well, then I saw how the mistake had been made, and that I had made it. In the brilliant sunshine I had mistaken the light yellow handkerchief for a white one, and it was up to me. They didn't give me a chance to get in a word, though, for they believed, and believe yet, I suppose, that I had thrown them, and they both hopped me at once. I had to put up the fight of my life, but I downed them both finally with the aid of a chair and a spittoon, and got away. That's how I lost $15,000—counting the winnings we'd have made had I played Bowling Brook that time—by being color blind.'"

["WHOOPING" A RACE-HORSE UNDER THE WIRE.]

A Novel Method of Treating Sulky Thoroughbreds That Often Works Profitably.

"I see they hollered an old skate home and got him under the wire first by three lengths out at the Newport merry-go-round the other day," said an old-time trainer out at the Gravesend paddock. "Don't catch the meaning of hollering a horse home? Well, it's scaring a sulker pretty near out of his hide and hair and making him run by sheer force of whoops let out altogether. This nag, Kriss Kringle, that was hollered home at Newport a few days ago, is a sulker from the foot-hills. He was sold as an N. G. last year for $25, and at the beginning of this season he prances in and wins nine or ten straight races right off the reel at the Western tracks, hopping over the best they've got out there. Then he goes wrong, declines to crawl a yard, and is turned out. They yank him into training again awhile back, put him up against the best a-running on the other side of the Alleghanies, and he makes 'em look like bull-pups one day and the next he can't beat a fat man. He comes near getting his people ruled off for in-and-out kidding, and then, a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a bit less, he goes out and chews up the track record, and gets within a second of the world's record for the mile and three-eighths, I believe it was.

"Then, Tuesday they have him in at a mile and a sixteenth, with a real nippy field, as Western horses go. The right people, knowing full well the old Springbok gelding's propensities, shove their big coin in on him anyway, and take a chance on him being unable to keep up with a steam roller after his swell race a while before, and the whole crowd fall into line and bet on Kringle until the books give them the cold-storage countenance and say, 'Nix, no more.' Then they get up into the stand and around the finishing rail and they see the aged Kriss, who's a rank favorite, begin like a land crab, when he usually goes out from the jump and spread-eagles his bunch. They begin the hard-luck moan when they see the sour son of Springbok trailing along third in a field of five, and they look into each other's mugs and chew about being on a dead one. Turning into the stretch, the old skate is a poor third, and stopping every minute, a plain case of sulks, like he's put up so many times before. The two in front of him have got it right between them, when Kris comes along into the last sixteenth, still third by a little bit, and then the gang let out in one whoop and holler that could be heard four miles. It's 'Wowee! come on here, ye danged old buck-jumper!' and 'Whoop-la! you Kringle!' from nearly every one of the thousand leather lungs in the stand and up against the rail, and the surly old rogue pins his ears forward and hears the yelp. Then it's all off. The old $25 cast-off jumps out like a scared rabbit at the sixteenth-pole. The nearer he gets to the stand the louder the yelping hits him and the bigger he strides; and he collars the two in front of him as if they were munching carrots in their stalls, and romps under the string three lengths to the good. That's what hollering a horse home means. It's a game that can only be worked on sulkers. The yelling scares the sulker into running, whereas it's liable to make a good-dispositioned horse stop as if sand-bagged.

"I've seen the holler-'em-in gag worked often at both the legitimate and the outlaw tracks, and for big money. One of the biggest hog-slaughterings that was ever made at the game was when an Iroquois nag, a six-year-old gelding named McKeever, turned a rank outsider trick at Alexander Island, Va., in 1895. The boys that knew what was going to happen that time surely did buy it by the basketful for a long time afterward. McKeever was worth about $2 in his latter career, and not a whole lot more at any stage of the game, according to my way of sizing 'em. As a five and six-year-old, he couldn't even make the doped outlaws think they were in a race, but his people kept him plugging away on the chance that some day or other he might pick up some of the spirit of his sire, the royal Iroquois, and pay for his oats and rubbing, anyhow. When he was brought to Alexander Island in the spring of '95, and tried out it was seen that he was just the same old truck-mule. One morning, after he'd been beaten a number of times by several Philadelphia blocks, when at 100 to 1 or so in the books, his owner had him out for a bit of a canter around the ring, with a 140-pound stable boy on him. A lot of stable boys and rail birds were scattered all around the infield, assembled in groups at intervals of 100 feet or so, chewing grass and watching the horses at their morning work. This old McKeever starts around the course as if he's doing a sleep-walking stunt. The boy gives him the goad and the bat, but it's no good. McKeever sticks to his caterpillar gait, and his owner leans against the rail with a watch in his mitt and mumbles unholy things about the skate. There's a laugh among the stable boys and the rail birds as McKeever goes gallumphing around. Then a stable lad that's got a bit of Indian in him leans over the rail just as McKeever's coming down, and lets out a whoop that can be heard across the Potomac. McKeever gives a jump, and away he goes like the wind. It looks so funny to the rail birds along the line that they all take up the yelp, and McKeever jumps out faster at every shout. He gets to going like a real, sure-enough race horse by the time he has made the circuit once, and he keeps right on. The owner gets next to it that it's the shouting that's keeping the old plug on the go, and he waves his arms and passes the word along for the boys to keep it up. McKeever does six furlongs in 1:14 with the assistance of the hollering, and the owner takes him off the track, gives him a look-over and some extra attention, and smiles to himself.

"Then he pushes McKeever into a six-and-half furlong race on the following day. He stations about twenty or twenty-five rail birds, all of 'em stable boys out of a job, in the infield, and hands them out their yelling instructions. McKeever is up against one of the best fields of sprinters at the track, and he goes to the post at 30 to 1 and sticks at that. His owner puts a large number of his pals next to what's going to happen, and not a man of them plays the good thing at the track. They have their coin telegraphed in bundles to the poolrooms all over the country. McKeever gets out in front, and he hasn't made more than a dozen jumps before one of the kids inside the rail throws a whoop that makes the people in the stand put their hands to their ears. McKeever gives a swerve and a side step, and away he goes like the Empire State express. A hundred feet further, when he's four lengths in the lead, and the others, including the even money shot, nowhere, a couple more rail birds shoot out another double-jointed yell, and McKeever jumps out again like an ice-yacht. He gets the holler at every 100 feet of his journey, the rail birds not taking any chances on his stopping, although after the first furlong he is six lengths to the good, and the result is that McKeever simply buck-jumps in, pulled double, with eight lengths of open daylight between him and the even money shot. The owner looks sad, like a man who hasn't put a dollar down, and says real hard things to McKeever when the horse is being led to his stable. When he gets him inside his stall, though, the hugs and loaf sugar that fall McKeever's way are a heap. The old-time poolroom people will tell you yet how they had to turn the box, a good many of 'em, the day that McKeever was hollered home at old Alexander Island.

"And, talking about Alexander Island, there were some funny ones yanked off over there, sure enough, some of them almost as funny as a few that happened over in New York at the legit tracks this passing season. Without hurling out any names, I'll just tell you of how a plunger who has been a good deal talked about this year, on account of his big winnings, got the dump-and-the-ditch at the hands of a poor-but-honest-not owner at Alexander Island in the same year of 1895. This plunger wasn't such a calcined tamale in those days as he is now, but he was some few, and he generally had enough up his sleeve in order to keep him in cigarettes and peanuts; which is to say that he had a winning way about him, and access to everything that was doing at that outlaw track. He dealt in jockeys quite a lot, giving them their figure with a slight scaling down, according to his own idea of what was coming to them for being kind to him. He was wise and he was haughty, and toward the wind-up of that Alexander Island season he fell into the notion, apparently, that things had to be done his way or the kickers fade out of the game.

"This poor owner that I'm talking about went on to Alexander Island with an ordinary bunch of sprinters, all except one filly, that was real good, but a bit high in flesh, and not ripe. It was a filly that could as a matter of fact beat anything at the track, being right and on edge, and she had the additional advantage of not being known all about. The poor owner has his own boy along with him, and he's pretty hard up. He sticks this filly in a six-furlong event, with the idea of really going after the purse, which he requires for expenses. He knows that the filly isn't right, but he dopes it that she can beat the lot pitted against her, anyhow, and he really means her to win. He tells his boy to take her right out in front and get as good a lead as he can, so that in case her flesh stops her the rest'll never be able to get near her. That's the arrangement right up until post time. The filly—well, suppose we call her Juliet—is not very well known at Alexander Island, and she has 5 to 1 against her.

"Now, it happens that this plunger knows all about Juliet being, as I say, a pretty fast proposition, but he doesn't think she can win in her condition, and, anyhow, he has something doing on another one in the race; he has so much doing in the race, in fact, that all the rest of 'em, except Juliet, are dead to the one he has picked to play. The plunger digs up the owner of Juliet and says to him:

"'My son, your baby won't do to-day.'

"'She'll make a stab, though,' said the owner. 'I need the cush, being several shy of paying my feed bills. The game has been throwing me lately. She's going to try.'

"'You need the purse, hey?' said the plunger. 'That's not much money. Only $200, ain't it? How'd $500 do?'

"'Spot coin?' asks the impecunious owner.

"'Spot coin after my weanling gets the money.'

"'You're on,' says the poor-but-honest-not owner. 'I'm not any more phony than my neighbors, but it's a case of real dig with me just now. Juliet'll finish in the ruck. Are you cinchy about the one you've got turning the trick?'

"'It's like getting money in a letter,' says the plunger.

"'All right,' says the poor owner, 'you can walk around to my stall and push me the five centuries after they're in.'

"The poor owner saw his boy, and Juliet's head was yanked off, with the boy's toes tickling her ears. She could have won in a walk, short of work as she was, but the boy had a biceps, and he held her down so that the plunger's good thing went through all right.

"After the race the plunger, who had made a great big thing out of it, hunted up the poor owner and beefed about the $500. He said that he hadn't been able to get as much money on his good one as he had expected and asked the poor owner to compromise for $300. The plunger's poor mouth doesn't tickle the poor owner a little bit, but he is a pretty foxy piece of work himself, and he takes the three hundred without letting on a particle that he thinks it a cheap gag. The plunger goes away thinking he has the poor owner on his staff for good, and the poor owner makes sundry and divers resolutions within himself, to the general effect that the next time he does business with that plunger he'll know it.

"Well, the poor owner doesn't race his good filly again for a couple of weeks, and all the time she's getting good. He gives her her work at about 3 o'clock every morning, in the dreamy dawn, so that nobody gets onto it just how good she is getting. He shoots her in about two weeks after he has been dickered down by the plunger. He knows that she's going to win, and with his other skates he has picked up nearly a thousand wherewith to play the Juliet girl to win. On the day before the race the plunger comes to him again.

"'I see you've got that nice little girl of yours in to-morrow,' he says. 'How good is she?'

"'She's got a show for the big end of it,' says the poor owner.

"'Um,' says the plunger. 'Well, she'll only be at 5 to 1, whereas I've got a cinch in that that'll be as good as 15 to 1. Do you think we can do a little business?'

"'On a strictly pay-in-advance basis, yes,' says the poor owner, chewing a straw. 'Maybe I'll be able to see my way to delivering the goods for a thousand down. Otherwise I win.'

"The plunger made a terrific beef, and tried persuasiveness, oiliness, bull-dozing the whole works, with the poor owner.

"'Why,' he says, 'I can buy all the Juliets from here to Kentucky and back for a thousand.'

"'Yes,' says the poor owner, 'but you can't shove a 15 to 1 shot through every day, either. Let's not talk about it any more. You've got my terms. Thousand down, right now, and Juliet will also ran. No thousand, Juliet walks, and I'll get the coin anyhow by betting on her.'

"He got the thousand two hours before the race was run. The poor owner looked Juliet over, and called his boy into a dark corner of the stable.

"'Take her out in front, son,' he said, 'and tow-rope them. Don't let 'em get within a block of you. I'll send your mother a couple o' hundred after you fetch her home.'

"'She'd win with a dummy on her,' says the kid.

"Then the poor-but-honest-not owner takes the thousand he already has in his kick, and the thousand the beefing plunger has given him, and spraddles it all over the United States on Juliet at from 5 to 7 to 1.

"Juliet wins by fourteen lengths, and the plunger, with his mouth twitching, hunts up the owner of Juliet. All he gets is a line of chile con carne conversation, and, finally, a puck in the eye.

"'Do others or they'll do you' isn't the way they used to teach it when I went to Sunday-school," concluded the old-time trainer, "but there are occasions when the rule just has to be twisted that way."

[JUST LIKE FINDING MONEY.]

A Bottled-up Cinch That Came Off at One of the Chicago Tracks.

"The first bet that I ever put down on a horse race," said a horse owner and trainer at an uptown café the other night, "was on a horse that stood at 100 to 1 in the betting. It was also the first race I ever saw run by thoroughbreds. I was clerking in a Long Island City grocery store for $8 a week at the time, and I didn't know a race-horse from a ton of coal. I got a couple of my fingers crushed between two salt fish boxes one morning, and I had to lay off from work. I didn't want to hang around my room, and didn't know what to do with myself, and so when a no-account young fellow I knew suggested that I go over with him to Monmouth Park and have a look at the races, I fell in with the proposition. Besides the remains of my previous week's pay, about $3, I had $20 saved up out of my wages, and I kept this in one $20 note in my inside vest pocket. After paying for round-trip tickets for my friend and myself, and for two tickets of admission to the race grounds, I was practically broke with the exception of a few cents, for I didn't count the $20 as available assets. I intended to hang on to that unbroken. Well, I found that all my sporty friend wanted of me was to have me pay his way on the train and into the grounds, for he promptly lost me as soon as we got by the gate. I felt pretty sore at this treatment, not that I wanted his help, for I hadn't the least idea of doing any betting with my savings, but I didn't cotton to the notion of being played for a good thing and then thrown that way.

"I walked around among the crowd with my hands in my pockets, wondering a good deal over the dope talk of the ducks that knew all about the horses and their preferred weights, distances, riders, and so on; it was all Greek to me then. Finally I was shouldered and jostled into the betting ring. It wasn't long before I began to rubberneck at the prices laid against the horses on the bookies' blackboards. Although I didn't know anything about the nags then, I found out afterward, when I had made a study of the game and got a little next to it, that this race I made my first bet on was composed of a cheap mess of fourteen selling platers. They were at all kinds of prices, from 4 to 5 on to 100 to 1 against. The latter price was laid about three of 'em. I didn't exactly understand what the 100 to 1 meant, and so I asked a fellow standing near by to explain it. He looked me over out of the slants of his lamps, thinking, probably, that I was stringing him. When he saw that I was a green one he told me that the 100 to 1 meant that if a 100 to 1 shot won that I had put a dollar on I'd be $100 ahead of the game. This looked pretty good to me. I didn't know anything about horse form or horse quality then, and I thought that one of 'em had just as much chance as another to win. So I picked out the 100 to 1 shot whose name I liked best and elbowed my way up to a booky's stand to put a dollar down on it, holding my $20 bill tightly gripped in my hand. I passed the twenty up to the bookmaker—he went broke, and has been a dead 'un for a good many years now—and said:

"'Give me a dollar's worth of that fourth horse from the top—that one with the 100 to 1 chalked before his name.'

"The booky looked down at me contemptuously, without accepting the twenty I proffered him, and said:

"'I don't want no dollar bets.'

"Well, this made me feel pretty cheap, especially as all of the ducks back of me, waiting to pass up their fifties and hundreds gave me the laugh. I didn't like to be shown up in that public way. I was just as sore at that time about being made to look like thirty cents as I am to-day. So I did a bit of lightning thinking. 'Twenty's a big bunch to me,' I thought, 'and I've had to hop out of bed at half past 3 in the morning to go to meat market a good many times to get it together; but I'll be hanged if I'm going to let this fellow get away with his idea of making me look small, even if I haven't got a show on earth.' So I passed the bill up to him again, saying:

"'All right, there, billionaire. Just gimme $20 worth of that fourth horse from the top, with 100 to 1 chalked before his name.'

"I was chagrined to find that this strong play didn't help me a little bit. The booky only grinned as he chanted, 'Two thousand dollars to $20 on the fourth one from the top,' and the chap that wrote me the ticket grinned back at him, and the crowd behind me again gave me the hoarse hoot, loud and long continued. I'll bet I was blushing on the bottom of my feet when I snatched the ticket and hurried away from that booky's stall, with the chuckles of the hot-looking members ringing in my ears. Well, my horse walked in.

"When I went to cash my ticket for $2,020 the booky sized me up, with all kinds of wrath in his eyes.

"'A good make-up you've got for a Rube,' he said to me. 'You're good. That's the most scientific commissioner act I've seen pulled off up to date, and I've been at this game ever since Hickory Jim was a two-year-old.'

"I didn't know what he was talking about. The word commissioner was particularly mysterious to me, but I wasn't going to let him put it on me again, and I like to have drove him crazy with the slow grin I gave him. He chucked the bundle of $2,020 at me, and I just walked backward with it in my hands and grinning at him. He was the maddest-looking man I ever saw, before or since. I didn't go back to my grocery job, nor did I hop in and slough off my $2,000 on a game I didn't know anything about. I didn't play another horse that year, but went in and made a study of the game, going to the tracks every day to see 'em run and to think the whole institution over. It has taken me all of the years that have passed since to find out that the study of horse racing don't amount to a row of spuds, that study doesn't beat the game. I simply had a series of lucky plays after I figured it that I knew all there was to be learned about horse racing, and those plays put me on the velvet I've had to a greater or less extent ever since. I don't often play them now—I've got a fairly nifty string, and I run 'em and let the other fellows do the guessing.

"What set me to thinking about this first play of mine was a letter I received the other day from an owner, who's racing his string down at New Orleans, about the win of that plug Covington, Ky., the other day. The price laid against Covington, Ky., was at first 150 to 1, and the rail birds in the know battered it down to 60 to 1 at post time, throwing all kinds of misery into the layers when the plater romped in, after being practically left at the post. My friend says in his letter that a big bookmaker declined to take a dollar bet from one of the wise rail birds on Covington, Ky., at 150 to 1, and that the young fellow got chesty, dug into the pocket where he kept his silver, found $2 in quarters and halves, and handed the $3 to the bookie on Covington, Ky., to win. The layer took the money and it cost him $450. The bookie, my friend writes me, has been poked in the ribs over the thing by his fellow-layers ever since.

"I don't often pay any attention to good things," continued the turfman, "and it's rarer still that I am compelled to regret my indifference to the bottled-up cinches, but, in common with about 3,000 other people, I overlooked a proposition at Lakeside last fall that caused me several minutes' hard thinking. I didn't lose any money over it, but it's hard to think of the inside chance I neglected on that occasion to make an old-fashioned hog killing. I had four or five of my three-year-olds out at Lakeside and was pulling a purse down with 'em once in a while, and depending on the purses to keep me even with the game and strong for hay money. I wasn't doing any betting; I took my confirmed indifference to good things along with me to Chicago, and I think now, looking back at the season, that I made a bit of a mistake in doing so, for if there's any place in the country outside of the outlaw tracks where good things do have a habit of going through right often, then that place is Chicago. I didn't profit by any of 'em that were made to stick last fall, however, although I saw many a sure thing soaked down from 20 to 1 to 4 to 1 at post time, and then come in romping with all the money. A lot of men I knew out at Lakeside—fellows with small strings, none of which ever won or got in the money—were on all kinds of velvet by giving ear to the inside good things, but they didn't make me jealous a little bit. I'm in the game for keeps, and that's more than can be said for the good-thing players.

"Anyhow, for all that, I'm still regretting that I overlooked this chance I'm speaking of. I was in a Dearborn street hang-out for racing men one night, along toward the wind-up of the racing season, when a boy came inside and told me a man out at the front door wanted to see me. I went out and found a drunken stable hand waiting for me. He was employed as a general stable roustabout by the owner of a California string, and I had befriended the man in the paddock a few days before when he was engaged in a rum fight with another stable hand. He was getting the worst of the scrap when I stepped in and pulled his antagonist off of him. It didn't amount to anything, this, but the tank stable hand that was waiting for me outside of the Dearborn street place in the rain seemed to feel grateful to me for it.

"'Hello, Bill,' said I to him, 'what's up?'

"'Got fired this afternoon,' he replied.

"'Broke?' I asked him.

"'I didn't hunt you up to touch you, boss,' he said. 'I got a good thing I want to give to you. You've been square to me. The good thing's to come off to-morrow, and nobody's on. I'm preaching on it because I've been dropped from the track just for getting a skate on, and because I want to put you next, that's been on the level with me.'

"'You can pass me up,' I told the man. 'I don't play the sure ones, you know.'

"'But this is ripe, and it's going to happen,' persisted the man. 'It's a baby. It's a looloo. It's a cachuca. It's that filly Mazie V. in the two-year-old race to-morrow. You know who's stable she belongs in. I heard the chaw about it this afternoon before I got fired, and they didn't get on to it that I was listening. Mazie V.'s going to walk in to-morrow. No dope, but she's fit. She worked three-quarters in .15 flat early yesterday morning when nobody was looking, and she's on edge. They're going to burn up the books with it. I know that nobody can tout you, and I'm not trying to tout you. But here's a chance, and I came down to let you know.'

"Well, of course I had to thank the man, but I couldn't help but grin at him at that.

"'How long have you been rubbing 'em down?' I asked him.

"'I've been around the horses since I was ten years old,' he replied.

"'And still so easy?' I couldn't help but say. 'Well, I won't say anything of what you've told me so as to queer the price, if there's any play on Mazie V., but, of course, as for myself, I pass it up; thanks all the same to you. Need any money?'

"No, he didn't want any money, he said. He had simply hunted me up to put me on to one of the best things of the meeting, and he shambled off.

"When the books opened for that two-year-old race the next day, Mazie V., a clean-limbed filly that had never shown a particle of class, opened up the rank outsider in a big field, which included some very fairish two-year-olds. I looked the books over, not because I was betting, but just out of habit, and I saw that every nag in the race was being played but Mazie V., the 150 to 1 shot.

"'If they're going to burn the bookies out on Mazie V., I thought, amusedly, 'it's a wonder the stable connections don't take some of this good 150 to 1.'

"As I was thinking this over, the ex-stableman who had hunted me up with the Mazie V. good thing the night before plucked me by the sleeve. He was several times as drunk as an owl, and I didn't care to talk with him.

"'Are you down?' he asked me, lurching. 'Because 'f you ain't, you're campin' out, an' that's all there is to it.'

"'Go and take a sleep,' I told him, and passed on. But he didn't want any sleep. Instead, he drunkenly mounted a box that he found in the betting ring, and started to make an address to the hustling bettors.

"'Hey!' he shouted, 'if you mugs want to git aboard for the barbecue, play Mazie V. She's going to be cut loose. She's a 1 to 10 chance. She's going through. It's a cinch.'

"The crowd guyed him.

"'It's so good,' shouted the poor devil, 'that I just put the last $8 I got on earth on her to win—not to show, but to win. Hey! I'm not touting. I'm trying to give you all a win-out chance. You needn't think because I ain't togged out that I'm a dead one on this. Even if I have got a load along, why'——

"Just then somebody, probably an interested party, kicked the box from under the man and he went sprawling. That closed him up. The crowd roared, but not a man in the gang, of course, put down a dollar on Mazie V. If any of the pikers had even a dream of doing such a thing the stable hand's drunken recommendation of the filly switched them off. Just before the horses went to the post the $5 bills of people that weren't pikers, but stable connections, went into the ring in such quantities on Mazie V. that she closed at 100 to 1 in a few of the books, and at much smaller figures in most of the others.

"Well, the way that little filly Mazie V. put it all over her field was something ridiculous. The race was something easy for her. There was nothing to it but Mazie V. She got away from the post almost dead last, and then picked up her horses at leisure, revelling in the heavy going, and, loping up in the last sixteenth, walked in with daylight between her and the favorite. It was one of the killings of the Chicago racing season, and the books were soaked to over $20,000 on $5 bets.

"'That certainly is hard money to lose, to say the least,' I heard poor Mike Dwyer mumble on the day that he took 1 to 15 on Hanover, putting down $45,000 to win $3,000, and Hanover got himself disgracefully beaten by Laggard. And that's what I think about that Mazie V. good thing—hard money not to have won."

[THIS SON OF FONSO WAS OF NO ACCOUNT.]

But When He Did Take It Into His Head to Run One Day, the Bookmakers Were Damaged.

An old-time trainer, who is trying out a bunch of yearlings and keeping up a lot of old campaigners out at the old Ivy City track near Washington, was chewing wisps of hay the other afternoon and thinking aloud.

"One of the things that I can't exactly figure out," said he, "is whether I'm a ringer-worker or on the level. That proposition has been bothering me a heap in the middle of nights right along since the fall of '87. I got into the center of a game then that has kept me apologizing to myself ever since. And, then, again, that plug wasn't a sure-enough proper ringer. And I didn't put him over the plate, either. My end of it was only to cop out a few, and all I had to do was to——

"Well, anyhow, I went down to a yearling sale in Kentucky for the man I was training for in 1885. There were some Fonso bull-pups to be auctioned off, and the boss wanted a Fonso or two. You remember Fonso, don't you? He's the old nag, a great one in his times, who got the blue ribbon only the other day at the age of twenty-three for being still the finest specimen of a thoroughbred in Kentucky. The boss wanted a couple of Fonsos and I went after them. I got him two and myself one. The one I got was the worst-looking he-scrag that ever wore hoofs. He was out of a good mare, but he upset all the calculations of breeding. He was the worst seed in looks that ever I clapped my eyes on; and I've been fooling with yearlings for a quarter of a century. He was an angular swayback, leggy, low-spirited, thick-headed, and as fast as a caterpillar. Yet I bought him. I didn't expect ever to make anything out of him, but I was pretty flush then, and I didn't want to see a Fonso pulling a dray if there was a chance in a thousand of making anything out of him. That colt was a joke. The whole crowd gave him the hoot when he was led into the auction ring, and I couldn't hold down a grin myself when I sized up the poor mutt of a camel, the worst libel on a great sire that ever crawled into an auction ring for a bid. The whole gang jeered me when I offered $100 for the skate. I didn't blame 'em. But I led the colt out, put him in a stall, and then went back to the sale. I got two high-grade Fonsos for my boss, and they won themselves out for him twenty times over in the next three years. But they don't figure in this story.

"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.'

"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.

"We all gibed and roasted Red about the delirium-tremens finish we foresaw for him, and when he didn't turn up at the track at all on the following day, necessitating the turning of his dog-robbing work over to another man, there was a lot of talk about the tremendous barrel-house toot Red must have gone on down the levee way. That's where we were camping out. When we picked up the papers on turning out the following morning we found a scare-head story in one of them relating in great detail and elaborate diction how one Mr. John S. Donnelly, a gentleman well known on the Western turf, had swatted Ed McGuckin's faro bank, over in East St. Louis, to the tune of $16,000, playing steadily without meals from 7 o'clock on the evening of Monday until 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, when Ed turned the box on him and announced that it was all off for the present. We all shouted 'fake!' when we saw that, but a couple of us hopped into a cab and crossed over to McGuckin's place to see if there was anything in the yarn. Well, there was everything in it. We found Ed holding his fevered brow and mumbling deep, dark things about damned vagabonds slipping into his layout and running shoe tongues up into leather factories. We expressed our sympathies with Ed, for which we came perilously near being kicked, and then we went back to St. Louis to hunt up Red. We went over the barrel-house route with a fine-tooth comb, but no Donnelly. Then we decided to drive out to his mother's little old shack. Our route from the levee out there took us through the down-town district, and we both saw Red on the street at once. We drew up alongside the curb, and called him. He was cold sober, and he had $16,210 in bills in his inside waistcoat pocket. We asked him where he was going, and he nodded in the direction of the swellest tailoring establishment in St. Louis. We went along with him, and it was one lovely sight to observe the fabrics Red picked out wherewith to ornament his long, lithe person. He ordered a dozen suits, and then we went with him to the haberdasher's. He was all for green and yellow neckties, pink-striped shirts, and that sort, and we let him have his way. Then he became sleepy. We threw it into him pretty hard about that big bundle of money he had on him, and he finally consented to come along to a bank with us and deposit $14,000 of it in his name. We tried to hold out for having it put in his mother's name, but he wouldn't stand for that. After leaving the bank Red's eagle eye caught sight of the shiny things in a jeweler's window, and he decided then and there that he couldn't go to sleep without having the third finger of his left hand made conspicuous by a three-karat blue-white stone, for which he coughed $500. That left him with about $1500 in his clothes, and we dragged him then into the cab and drove out to his mother's little old shanty. The old lady had her little talk with Barney Schreiber about the $3500 by that time, and the to-do she made over her 'bye Johnnie' was worth the ride to see. When we told her about the other bunch that Red had copped and that we had plunked it into the bank for him, the quantities of corned beef and cabbage which she threw into the pot for the dinner which she wanted us to remain to share with her and her phenomenal son were amazing.

"Well, Donnelly astonished us all for a couple of weeks by his extraordinary conduct. He would ride out to the track in a hack, with a gilt-stamped cigarette in his face, attend to his job as usual around the betting-ring—that is, he'd supervise, for he quickly accumulated a staff of worshiping touts and hangers-on—and then he'd go up into the grand-stand to exhibit his cake-walk clothes and look at the races. He didn't put a bet down on a horse for two weeks. He remained pretty sober all the time, too. We joshed him about the frigid pedals he had suddenly got, but he only passed along with the remark: 'I'm letting 'em run for O'Flaherty. Nothin' doin'.'

"We waited for the crash, but it didn't seem to come on schedule time. One afternoon he called me aside and showed me his bank-book. It showed an additional deposit of $5000, making the total $19,000.

"'When did you pick up that new roll?' I asked him.

"'Went up against the wheel at Terhune's last night, and yanked it out in three hours,' he said.

"'When did you learn to play roulette?' I asked him.

"'Last night,' he replied.

"Along toward the end of June Donnelly turned up at the track one afternoon with a light in his eye. He went out into the paddock and spent three-quarters of an hour looking at a horse and by that time the third race was due. Red came into the ring and spread $1000 around on Madeira at 10 to 1. It was a maiden two-year-old race, but Madeira romped in two lengths to the good. That night Red, still moderately sober and level-headed, had $29,000 to his credit in the bank. We began to figure with a new brand of dope on Donnelly's game and to consider the possibility of his becoming a real fixture. A lot of owners with bum skates tried to work them off on Donnelly at big prices, but he only passed them the cold-storage smirk. This gave us an additional line of thinks with regard to what we thought was his increasing shrewdness. Besides, you see, Red began to be right good to us. He told us all very soberly one afternoon that he had a good thing, but that he didn't want to hurt his own ring, so he'd send his money to the out-of-town poolrooms. The good thing was David, who won the last race in a walk at 15 to 1, and Red cleaned up $15,000 on that.

"Right at this point, Schreiber and some other people got at Donnelly and tried to induce him to either invest a part of his money—he had almost $50,000 then—in a string of useful horses, to be put into the hands of a competent trainer—or to have the whole bundle properly invested in some sort of annuity, tie-up scheme whereby, when Red's streak of luck fizzled out, he wouldn't have to go back to buying cigarettes by the cent's worth. The man was too bull-headed, though, to listen to anything like this. He did, however, buy his old mother a fine house and install her in it, and the old lady had stiff black silk dresses and poppy-ornamented bonnets galore in which to go to mass.

"Meanwhile Red was going up against all kinds of games around town every night, and it honestly appeared as if he couldn't lose. Craps, stud poker, draw, wheel, red and black, mustang, bank—all seemed to be right in Donnelly's mitt. A lot of us used to turn up where he was bucking things every night, and, following his play, we always got the good end of it. He didn't know much about any of the games, and the idiotic things we had often to do in order to consistently follow his play made us gag, but nine times out of ten them came out right. One man in our party, a bookmaker, who determined to copper all of Red's play at the different games, on the theory that Donnelly's luck had to turn some time or another, almost went broke before he came into the fold and quit coppering.

"All of this time Donnelly had simply been nibbling at the red stuff. By the time his great luck was a month old, however, the booze had nailed him, and he got to throwing in the hooters early in the morning. A man can't drink in the morning and hang on either to luck or judgment. Red came into the ring palpably drunk one afternoon and spread around $20,000 on Strathmeath at even money. None of us wanted to take the money, for if ever there was a rank in-and-outer, that horse was Strathmeath. But Red was insistent and a bit ugly, and we accommodated him. Strathmeath ran third, beaten out by two dogs. That night Donnelly dropped $20,000 more at faro. Then he didn't go to bed for five nights, and at the end of that time he had about $6000 left. I never saw luck drop away from a man like it did from Red Donnelly. For instance, he was whacking at a bank one night, stupefied with hooters of half rye and half absinthe, and he shut one eye so he wouldn't see double and fixed it on the nine spot. He played the nine open for $100 a clip, and lost it twelve straight times. The frowns of the Lady Fortune got his nerve, and he began to play favorites at the track. The favorites went down to inglorious defeat, one after another, for days.

"Some of the right kind of people, including Schreiber, got hold of Red when he had only the $6000 left, landed him in a fix-up ward, and sobered him up. When he came out Donnelly was set up with an interest in an express business. I don't believe he ever saw the inside of the express office more than half dozen times, except to draw what was coming to him. He was at the track all the time the races lasted, and when the season closed he put in his time down on the levee. He never had a day's luck after his big streak up to the last hour of his death, somewhat less than a year after they came his way with a whoop and a rush.

"When the goddess smiles upon you, you want to stroke her hair, chuck her under the chin and be good to her, for she rarely acts amiable twice to a man who treats her favors wantonly."

[AND "RED BEAK JIM" TOOK THE TIP.]

Plunge Made by a Hackman on the Suburban Handicap Won by Kinley Mack.

"We'll get Red Beak Jim to hike us down in his caloosh," said the main guy of the four. The four were job holders in one of the New York city departments, and they were talking about ways and means of reaching the Sheepshead track for the Suburban.

"Good thing," said the three others. "Go on and ask Jimmy for a figure, down and back, for the bunch. Hey, and don't let him dicker you out o' your gilt teeth. Jimmy's a robber."

So the main guy of the four sprinted after Red Beak Jim. He found him with the major portion of his countenance immersed in the collarette of an open-faced malt magnum.

"Hey, Jim," said the main guy, "hitch 'em up and bring 'em around about noon. Down to the Bay and back. There's four of us. What d'ye say to the note for $10 for the job?"

Red Beak Jim removed the mammoth piece of glassware from his face long enough to remark:

"Nothin' doin'."

"Ain't, hey?" said the main guy. "The old caloosh's fallen apart at last, hey?"

Red Beak Jim sat the beer-glass down and wiped off his mouth with the back of his coat-sleeve.

"It'll be jugglin' around when you're yelling for ice at any old price a hunnered," said he. "Nope, I'm 'ngaged f'r th' Bay."

"Say, you've got your fingers crossed or your suspenders," said the main guy. "Give you fifteen for the job."

"Goin' t' take three down," said Red Beak Jim. "Ten a head. Sorry I didn't ask 'em fifteen. Trucks is chargin' ten a head."

"Ten a head," said the main guy, sarcastically. "What in, zinc money? Hey, pull around, Jim, or you'll lose a wheel. Ten a head? Get away with that hasheesh. Give us a figure."

"You've got it," replied Red Beak Jim. "Ten per, round trip. I'm a good thing at that. But I'm 'ngaged."

"So's me little sister," said the main guy. "All right, work your edge. What's ten a head to us, at that? Hey, we got the baby to-day, Jim, and you want to put some braces under that old caloosh. We'll have two ton o' money coming back. Bring 'er around, then, at noon. Say, you ought to get a pair o' knucks and a sandbag. You're too good on the clutch to push a caloosh around. Have 'er there prompt at noon, now, Jim."

"Sure," said Red Beak Jim, and he was there at noon, all right, with the hack all varnished up and dusted off, and the pair looking fit to reel off a mile in five minutes, on the bit. The four were inside, stirring their pieces of ice around with the spoons, when Red Beak Jim pulled up. He jumped off the seat and stuck his head in the door.

"At the pump, gents," said he.

They yanked him in to have one before the start, and they all got him over into the dark corner. Then the main guy addressed him.

"Jim," said the main guy, "we're handing this to you because you're all right—from the heels down. On the level, though, Jim, we pass this along to you because it's right. It's prepared. It's a nightingale in the woods, and it'll be singing when all the rest of 'em are still trying to find out where the wire is. Horse of the century? Nix. Not for these little Willies. The black, let 'er sleep wonder? Not. We stay out there. The Whitney thing with the Frenchy name? Hoot, mon. Pass this squad by. Nope. We got it right, Jimmy. And we're handing you the forty bucks now so's you can plant it right. Here's the forty—and say, you want to remember that you're paid, see? Well, you get over the fence somehow—let a kid take care o' your two goats and the caloosh—and you put the whole forty on Kinley Mack. See? Got that chalked? You put the forty on Kinley Mack, and part o' the two ton o' gilt we'll have on the come-back 'll belong to you. Kinley Mack's going to stand 'em all on their heads and twist 'em round. Don't say we didn't put you next. Uneeda win. Well, you win. Nothing to it. Kinley Mack. Ain't that right, you ducks?"

"That's right, all right," said the other three, all together.

Red Beak Jim emptied the flagon thoughtfully.

"I got mine at that game," said he finally. "They made a bum o' me before you people was through playin' jacks. They can run f'r Hogan. These"—salting away the two twenties the main guy had handed him—"will do f'r me. I don't want t' git rich fast, nohow. I'd booze meself foolish. Much 'bliged, gents, but I can't see no Kinley Macks or Billy Bryans, f'r that matter, wit' a spy-glass."

"All right," said the main guy, disgustedly. "But when the ring's around Kinley Mack, and they're paying off the wise people on him, you want to muffle the bleats you'll have coming, see? Don't say we never dished you up a hot one. You're a sport, Jimmy, and so's a tadpole. You'll never butt in among the first six. All right. Come on, you people."

They clinked the pieces of ice against the sides of their glasses once more, and then they climbed into the hack and were away in a row, to a good start.

At each of the seven places at which they stopped for ice, with trimmings, on the way down to the Bay, they announced to friends that they met that it was only going to be a one horse race.

"Run on a fast track, hey?" said the main guy to everybody he knew at the stops. "Say, that's his graft. That's his main plant. A race-horse can run on any old kind of a track. Say, you get tied up with this horse of the century business and you smoke stogies for a few months. Ethelbert, the horse of the century, hey? Say, d'je ever happen to hear of Salvator and Tenny and Hanover and Lamplighter and Henry of Navarre and Sir Walter and Raceland and Hamburg and a few old two-dollar mutts like that? Did, hey? Well, say, do they butt in? Say, Hamburg could've run backward as fast as this horse of the century that you people have all got the bug about. Kinley Mack! Kinley Mack! Hey, fellers?"

"Thash ri'," said the other three, and then they climbed into the hack again.

When they got down to the track entrance and alighted the main guy of the four, still mindful of his duty toward struggling fellow men, made a final appeal to Red Beak Jim.

"Jim," said he, "how about taking our steer, hey? This is the good thing o' the year. It's going to be a long summer. Going to put that forty on Kinley Mack?"

"I'm goin' t' take a nap after I have a smoke," replied Red Beak Jim, filling his pipe.

The four walked away with an air of disgust, while Red Beak Jim grinned after them.