Taking Chances Part 13

"'If my wife's hunch is right,' I thought, 'and that Jodan horse wins at 100 to 1 without my playing him, I'll never hear the last of it as long's I'm on top of the ground. She'll be telling me morning, noon and night, that she gave me a chance to win $5000, and that I didn't have enough gumption to take it. And if the good thing my shoe-clerk friend gave me wins at 5 to 1, I'll be sore on myself for throwing away a chance to pick up $250 if I don't play it.'

"I walked out onto the lawn so's I could have more room to make up my mind. Then I wheeled around suddenly and dived into the betting ring.

"'By cracky!' says I to myself, 'I'm doing this little gamble myself, and, feminine hunch or no hunch, I'm going to play that good thing my shoe-clerk friend gave me, and nothing else.'

"So I went to the first bookmaker I saw and got a $250 to $50 ticket on my good thing."

Here the man with the granulated lids sighed heavily and looked genuinely distressed.

"Say, it's the d.i.c.kens, ain't it," he said, after a pause, "how these things happen?"

The two men in the seat to whom he had been addressing his conversation exhibited a certain suppressed interest as to the outcome.

"Of course Jodan just walked in that day, at 100 to 1?" said one of them finally, with a grin that clearly indicated his belief that he had the result discounted.

The man with a ravelled cigar struck a match and lit the same for the eighteenth time.

"Not on your zinc wedding did Jodan walk in!" he said, puffing away without removing his eyes from the match. "My good thing spread-eagled 'em from the jump, and won, pulled up, by eight lengths. Jodan was last.

It sure is odd about these feminine hunches, ain't it?"

"Blamed if it ain't," said one of the men in the seat.

"I carried a twelve-pound lobster home to my wife that night and told her it was a fair replica of her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy horse, and she told me that she just wouldn't believe that Jodan hadn't won until she saw the paper the next morning, so there now! She caved, though, when I uncovered the $250 and told her that she couldn't get that cerise-silk-lined tailor-made dress quick enough to suit me, and she said that she might have known that no horse named after her Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy, who didn't have any more luck than to go and get himself lost at sea, could win anything.

"Well, a month or so after that I went down to Washington on a little matter of business, and took my wife along with me. There was horse racing going on near Washington then, at a track called St. Asaph, across the Potomac in Virginia.

"'Clarissa,' said I to my wife one morning, after I'd got all through with my business in Washington and was ready to come back to New York, 'I think we'd better stay over to-day and go to the races at St. Asaph.

A man that I met in the shooting gallery down the street gave me a good thing last night, and I think I ought to see to it. It's going to come off to-day.'

"Of course she told me again that I was going to rack and ruin, and never would make anything of myself, but I told her that I just naturally had to go over to St. Asaph that day and play Jodan.

"'Jodan!' she almost screamed at me. 'Theophilus Nextdoor, how can you have the hardihood to stand there and tell me that you are going to waste your money on that horrid beast, when both of us are absolutely in need of new fall outfits?'

"I told her that I'd see to the fall outfits, but that I sure couldn't get away from that Jodan good thing.

"'Why,' I said, don't you remember how wild you were about this same Jodan horse only a little more than a month ago?'

"'I just don't care one bit if I was,' she replied. 'I know and you know that any horse named after my Uncle Joseph Daniel McGeachy, who didn't have any more luck than to go and get himself lost at sea, cannot win, and I should think you would be ashamed of yourself to stand there and tell me to my face,' etc., etc.

"Well, she wouldn't go along with me to the track over at St. Asaph across the Potomac, and so I went alone. The man I had met in the shooting gallery had told me so earnestly about this Jodan horse that I couldn't fail to be impressed by his words, and when I found that my wife was so opposed to Jodan's chances was more than ever determined to play him, for I'd learned something about the nature of the feminine hunch, don't you see?

"It like to've carried me off my feet when I saw the price on the blackboards against Jodan. Jodan was quoted at 150 to 1. The favorite was at 3 to 5 on, and all of 'em, the whole fourteen in the race, were at shorter prices than Jodan. I clutched the $50 that I had intended playing on Jodan, thinking that he'd be about 10 to 1 or something like that, and I just thought and thought and thought over the thing.

"'By jimminy!' said I finally, after standing over in a corner alone for a while, thinking, 'my wife may be right about Jodan, and all that, but I came over here to play Jodan, and I'm going to play him or just bust, win or lose!'

"Then I went over to a bookmaker, got a $1500 to $10 ticket on Jodan to win. 'Take that hay out of your hair, pal,' the bookmaker said to me when I pa.s.sed my money over-and went up to the stand to see the race, thinking all the time what a serious matter it is to take a chance on playing against the feminine hunch.

"Jodan, after being practically left at the post, came out of the clouds in the stretch, and won the derned old race on the wire by a nose from the favorite, and when I hired a rig and packed those $1500 over to my wife the way she warmed up to her one and only Theophilus was sure a caution.

"The feminine hunch," concluded the man with the ravelled cigar and the granulated eyelids, "is all right when you copper it, but it won't do to play it open. Am I right?"

"No," said the two men in the seat, and then the rush to get off the train began.

A RACE HORSE THAT PAID A CHURCH DEBT.

_He Was Thought to Be a No-Account Cripple, but He Proved Himself to Be "All Horse" When Called Upon._

"A friend of mine who came here from Chicago for the Bennings meeting was telling me about that Jim McCleevy mule," said an old-time owner of thoroughbreds who is wintering a string of jumpers and breaking a bunch of yearlings out at the Bennings track. "That makes a queer story, and there are some strange things connected with the thoroughbred game, at that. This McCleevy horse wasn't worth a bag of moist peanuts at the beginning of the present racing season. He couldn't beat a fat man. He had never been in the money. He was a legitimate thousand-to-one shot in any company. He was the candidate for the shafts of a brick cart, when by some odd chance he pa.s.sed into the possession of a nice young woman who was going to school somewhere in the State of Iowa. The girl's uncle was mixed up some way or another with the turf, and he bought the McCleevy plug for a joke, paying a few dollars for him. In a spirit of fun he wrote to his niece that he had bought Jim McCleevy in her name, and that the horse belonged to her and would be run in her interest. The young woman didn't know the difference between a race-horse and a chatelaine bag. She was an orphan, and struggling to get an education for herself. Her ambition was to take a course at a woman's college, but, up to the time of this incident, which lasted throughout the spring and summer, her hope of putting this ambition over the plate was pretty shadowy, and it looked like it was up to her to get a job teaching a country school in order to support herself. But she wrote to her uncle that she accepted the gift of the no-account racer with grat.i.tude, and inquired if the horse could not trot right fast, for, if so, she might be able to dispose of him to some well-to-do farmer in her neighborhood.

"Jim McCleevy was attached to the string of a good trainer, who saw at once that the horse had been underestimated, that he had been badly handled, and that it would be worth the effort to try to make something of him. He spent two or three weeks monkeying with the skate and fixing him up, and then he sent him out one morning with a lummux of a stable boy on his back and put the watch on him. Jim McCleevy breezed a mile in 1:44, fighting for his head at the finish, and two days later he was slapped into a selling race at a mile and a sixteenth, with light weight, a b.u.m apprentice lad up, and all kinds of a price, for there were some good ones in the race, which was at the Harlem track, in Chicago. The girl's uncle scattered a few dollars around the ring on the mutt, all three ways, and McCleevy came home on the bit. That was the beginning of McCleevy. He was put into a couple of races a week at a mile and more, at the Harlem and Hawthorne tracks, during the entire racing season at Chicago, and he won race after race, no matter how they piled the weight penalties up on him. When he didn't win he broke into the money, and as there was always a good price on him, seeing that almost every time he raced he was pitted against horses that seemed to outcla.s.s him, the uncle of the girl who owned him got some of the money every time. He parleyed the money that he won for his niece on Jim McCleevy's first race, and he got it back and a bunch besides every time. The fame of Jim McCleevy spread around Chicago, and a Chicago newspaper man went down to Iowa to interview the young woman who owned the horse. She told him, artlessly, that while she abhorred gambling-well, she certainly did enjoy the prospect of being enabled to complete her education. Her uncle deposited between $8000 and $9000 in her name, the amount he had won for her in purses and bets on Jim McCleevy, at the wind-up of the racing season, and the horse, which developed quite a bit of real cla.s.s, still belongs to her.

"Odd, isn't it, that an underestimated race-horse should hop out and not only give a nice girl that had never so much as has stroked his sleek neck a chance to fulfil her ambition for an education, but win her a start in life that'll probably make her one of the eligible girls in the State of Iowa? But I recall a queerer one than that-how a cast-off crab suddenly developed into a race-horse and paid off a mortgage on a church.

"That happened out at Latonia four years ago. I was racing a few of my own out there at the time, and saw the affair from the beginning to the wind-up. I'll have to duck giving the names, for the good man who profited by the sudden development of the nag he accidentally became possessed of is still the pastor of a flock that congregates in a pretty little debt-free, brick and stone Roman Catholic church on the outskirts of Cincinnati.

"There was an old trainer hanging around the Latonia barns at that time who was in hard luck from a whole lot of different points of view. I'd known him on the metropolitan tracks years before, and he had been, in his day of prosperity, a good fellow and a horse-wise man, if ever one chewed a straw. When his health went back on him, however, six or seven years ago, and he couldn't personally attend to his work-he ran an open training stable-it was all off with him. The strings that he had been handling were taken away from him by the owners and put in other hands, and he went up against the day of adversity with a rattle. He had a few horses of his own, but these proved worthless, and most of them were finally taken away from him to pay feed bills. On top of it all he developed locomotor ataxia, and when I got out to the Latonia barns, four years ago, he could barely move around. How he contrived to exist I don't know, but I guess the boys chipped in a dollar or so every once in a while for the old man. The only horse that he had left when I reached Latonia with my little bunch was an old six-year-old gelding that was a joke. Well, call him Caspar. The mention of Caspar's name made even the stable-boy grin. Caspar looked a good deal like Diggs, that camel horse that's pulling down the purses now in New Orleans. He was all out of shape, with a pair of knees on him each as big as your hat; of all the bunged up, soured, chalky old skates that ever I looked over, this Caspar gelding was the limit. Yet he had been a pretty good two-year-old and a more than fair three-year-old. He had won four races as a two-year-old, and six as a three-year-old, but he was campaigned and drummed a heap, and when the old man shot him as a four-year-old Caspar could just walk, and that's all. He was a cripple from every point of the compa.s.s. He was chronically sour and sore, and he was as vicious and ugly as the devil, into the bargain. He never got anywhere near the money as a four and five-year-old, and he hadn't been raced at all as a six-year-old, when I first clapped an eye on his rheumatic old shape.

But the old man was a sentimentalist in his way, and he couldn't stand the idea of selling a horse that he had taken care of as a baby to some truck driver to be overworked and abused. So he hung on to Caspar, fed him, nursed him and took care of him generally, just as if the old plug was making good for all of this attention. Caspar was a standing gag around the Latonia stables.

"'Wait'll I joggle Caspar under the string by four lengths in the Kentucky Derby!' a monkey-faced apprentice jockey would say solemnly to the other kids, and then they'd all holler.

"Well, about a month after I struck Latonia-it was then getting on toward midsummer-the old trainer in hard luck who owned Caspar took to his bunk, not to get up any more. He only lasted two weeks. Two days before he died he sent for an old Irish priest that he had known for a number of years. The priest was the pastor of that little brick and stone church on the outskirts of Cincinnati that I spoke about. The old trainer had been a good Catholic all his life, and he received the last offices of his faith. Then he said to the priest:

"'Father, there's a crabbed, battered-up old dog of mine over at Latonia that I'll make you a present of. He's worth about one dollar and eighty cents, but he was a good racing tool when he was young, and I've never felt like turning him loose to hustle for himself. He's crippled up some, but you might get him broken to harness, so that he could haul your buggy around. I wish you'd take him and see that he doesn't get the worst of it. Caspar was pretty good to me a few times when I was up against it.'

"When the old man turns up his toes and dies the kindly priest came over to the barns to see if he could get any a.s.sistance in the way of putting our old hard-luck pal under the ground. He got it, of course, and enough for a tombstone besides. While he was at the stables the father thought he might as well have a look at the piece of horse-flesh that had been presented to him by the old man. So one of the trainers escorted him to Caspar's stall.

"'Could he ever be made any good for driving purposes?' the priest asked the trainer, who smiled.

"'He'd kick a piano-mover's truck into matchwood the first clatter out of the box,' replied the trainer.

"'I'll just let him stay over here for awhile until I decide what to do with him,' said the priest, and he went back to Cincinnati and buried the old trainer.

"Well, a couple of mornings later a fresh stable-boy who had just got a job in one of the barns put a bridle and saddle on old Caspar and took him for a breeze around the course just for fun. It was just at dawn, and a lot of us trainers were watching the early morning work of the horses. It struck me when Caspar pa.s.sed by the rail where I was standing that the old devil looked mighty skittish, and was doing a lot of prancing for a hammered-to-death skate, with b.u.m knees and all sorts of other complaints. About a minute later there was a yawp all along the rail.

"'Get next to that old Caspar!' a lot of the trainers shouted. I looked over toward the back-stretch, and there was the old skate with his head down, eating up the ground like a race-horse. We all jerked out our watches just as he flashed by the five-furlong pole and put them on him.

It was amazing to see the old mutt make the turn and come a-tearing down the stretch. If he didn't do that five furlongs in 1:02, darn me. All of our watches told the same story, and there was no mistake about it. When he pa.s.sed the judges' stand Caspar wanted to go right ahead and work himself out, but we all hollered at the boy to pull him up. The kid stopped the old gelding with difficulty. Caspar wanted to run, and he had a mouth on him as hard as nails.

"We got together and talked about Caspar. We were dumbfounded, and didn't know what to make of that exhibition of speed. Then a trainer who was, and still is, noted throughout the country as the most skilful horse-patcher that ever got into the game spoke up.

"'The old devil's just come back to himself, that's all there is about it,' he said. 'There are a lot of sprints in his old carca.s.s yet. All he needs is some patching. If he'll run like this work he's just done in five-furlong dashes, there's a chance for a slaughter with him. I'm going to ask the father to let me handle him and see if he can't be oiled up.'

"The trainer went over to Cincinnati that same morning and saw the priest.

"'Father,' said he, 'I don't want to get a man of your cloth mixed up with the racing game, but I think I can do something with that old racing tool, the old man bequeathed to you.' Then he told the priest about Caspar's phenomenal work that morning.