The Garden of Eden Part 3

"It--it must have made you sick!" said the girl.

"Not a bit. I knew the green jacket was going to finish ahead of the rest as well as I knew that my name was Ben Connor. I said he was left at the post. Well, it wasn't exactly that, but when the bunch came streaking out of the shoot, he was half a dozen lengths behind. It was a mile and an eighth race. They went down the back stretch, eight horses all bunched together, and the green jacket drifting that half dozen lengths to the rear. The wise guys turned and grinned at me; then they forgot all about me and began to yell for King Charles and Miss Lazy.

"The bunch were going around the turn and the two favorites were fighting it out together. But I had an eye for the green jacket, and halfway around the turn I saw him move up."

The girl sighed.

"No," Connor continues, "he hadn't won the race yet. And he never should have won it at all, but King Charles was carrying a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, and Miss Lazy a hundred and thirty-three, while Tip-Top Second came in as a fly-weight eighty-seven pounds! No horse in the world could give that much to him when he was right, but who guessed that then?

"They swung around the turn and hit the stretch. Tip-Top took the curve like a cart horse. Then the bunch straightened out, with King Charles and Miss Lazy fighting each other in front and the rest streaking out behind like the tail of a flag. They did that first mile in 1.38, but they broke their hearts doing it, with that weight up.

"They had an eighth to go--one little measly furlong, with Tip-Top in the ruck, and the crowd screaming for King Charles and Miss Lazy; but just exactly at the mile post the leaders flattened. I didn't know it, but the man in front of me dropped his gla.s.ses and his head. 'Blown!' he said, and that was all. It seemed to me that the two in front were running as strongly as ever, but Tip-Top was running better. He came streaking, with the boy flattening out along his neck and the whip going up and down. But I didn't stir. I couldn't; my blood was turned to ice water.

"Tip-Top walked by the ruck and got his nose on the hip of King Charles.

Somebody was yelling behind me in a squeaky voice: 'There is something wrong! There's something wrong!' There was, too, and it was the eighty-seven pounds that a fool handicapper had put on Tip-Top. At the sixteenth Miss Lazy threw up her head like a swimmer going down and dropped back, and Tip-Top was on the King's shoulder. Fifty yards to the finish; twenty-five--then the King staggered as if he'd been hit between the ears, and Tip-Top jumped out to win by a neck.

"There was one big breath of silence in the grand stand--then a groan. I turned my head and saw the two wise guys looking at me with sick grins.

Afterward I collected two thousand bucks from a sicker looking bookie."

He paused and smiled at the girl.

"That was the 11th of July. First real day of my life."

She gathered her mind out of that scene.

"You stepped out of a telegraph office, with your finger on the key all day, every day, and you jumped into two thousand dollars?"

After she had stopped speaking her thoughts went on, written in her eyes.

"You'd like to try it, eh?" said Ben Connor.

"Haven't you had years of happiness out of it?"

He looked at her with a grimace.

"Happiness?" he echoed. "Happiness?"

She stepped back so that she put his deeply-marked face in a better light.

"You're a queer one for a winner."

"Sure, the turf is crowded with queer ones like me."

"Winners, all of 'em?"

His eye had been gradually brightening while he talked to her. He felt that the girl rang true, as men ring true, yet there was nothing masculine about her.

"You've heard racing called the sport of kings? That's because only kings can afford to follow the ponies. Kings and Wall Street. But a fellow can't squeeze in without capital. I've made a go of it for a while; pretty soon we all go smash. Sooner or later I'll do what everybody else does--put up my cash on a sure thing and see my money go up in smoke."

"Then why don't you pull out with what you have?"

"Why does the earth keep running around the sun? Because there's a pull.

Once you've followed the ponies you'll keep on following 'em. No hope for it. Oh, I've seen the boys come up one after another, make their killings, hit a streak of bad luck, plunge, and then watch their sure-thing throw up its tail in the stretch and fade into the ruck."

He was growing excited as he talked; he was beginning to realize that he must make his break from the turf now or never. And he spoke more to himself than to the girl.

"We all hang on. We play the game till it breaks us and still we stay with it. Here I am, two thousand miles away from the tracks--and sending for dope to make a play! Can you beat that? Well, so-long."

He turned away gloomily.

"Good night, Mr. Connor."

He turned sharply.

"Where'd you get that name?" he asked with a trace of suspicion.

"Off the telegram."

He nodded, but said: "I've an idea I've been chattering to much."

"My name is Ruth Manning," answered the girl. "I don't think you've said too much."

He kept his eyes steadily on her while he shook hands.

"I'm glad I know some one in Lukin," said Connor. "Good night, again."

_CHAPTER FOUR_

When Connor wakened the next morning, after his first impression of blinding light, he closed his eyes and waited for the sense of unhappy doom which usually comes to men of tense nerves and active life after sleep; but, with slow and pleasant wonder, he realized that the old numbness of brain and fever of pulse was gone. Then he looked up and lazily watched the shadow of the vine at his window move across the ceiling, a dim-bordered shadow continually changing as the wind gathered the leaves in solid ma.s.ses and shook them out again. He pored upon this for a time, and next he watched a spider spinning a web in the corner; she worked in a draft which repeatedly lifted her from her place before she had fastened her thread, and dropped her a foot or more into s.p.a.ce.

Connor sat up to admire the artisan's skill and courage. Compared to men and insects, the spider really worked over an abyss two hundred feet deep, suspended by a silken thread. Connor slipped out of bed and stood beneath the growing web while the main cross threads were being fastened. He had been there for some time when, turning away to rub the ache out of the back of his neck, he again met the contrast between the man of this morning and the man of other days.

This time it was his image in the mirror, meeting him as he turned. That deep wrinkle in the middle of the forehead was half erased. The lips were neither compressed nor loose and shaking, and the eye was calm--it rested him to meet that glance in the mirror.

A mood of idle content always brings one to the window: Connor looked out on the street. A horseman hopped past like a day shadow, the hoofbeats m.u.f.fled by thick sand, and the wind, moving at an exactly equal pace, carried a mist of dust just behind the horse's tail.

Otherwise there was neither life nor color in the street of weather-beaten, low buildings, and the eye of Connor went beyond the roofs and began to climb the mountains. Here was a bald bright cliff, there a drift of trees, and again a surface of raw clay from which the upper soil had recently slipped; but these were not stopping points--they were rather the steps which led the glance to a sky of pale and transparent blue, and Connor felt a great desire to have that sky over him in place of a ceiling.

He splashed through a hasty bath, dressed, and ran down the stairs, humming. Jack Townsend stood on a box in the corner of the room, probing at a spider web in the corner.

"Too late for breakfast?" asked Connor.

The fat shoulders of the proprietor quivered, but he did not turn.

"Too late," he snapped. "Breakfast over at nine. No favorites up here."

Connor waited for the wave of irritation to rise in him, but to his own surprise he found himself saying: