Thoroughbreds Part 14

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

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

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

"And what did you say?" blandly inquired Crane.

"Told him to go to h.e.l.l."

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

So you see Lauzanne is a bad betting proposition."

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not."

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

"Figures sometimes lie," commented Crane.

"Every handicapper tips him to win."

"They're all broke because of their knowledge."

"The books'll mark him up first choice."

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

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

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

"Didn't beat--what the h.e.l.l--didn't the Chestnut get the verdict?"

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

The Cherub waited for an explanation of these contradictory remarks. But he might have waited indefinitely--Crane had quite finished. The Cherub raised his little round eyes, that were like gla.s.s alleys, green and red and blue-streaked, to the other's face inquiringly, and encountered a pair of penetrating orbs peering at him over some sort of a mask--the face that sustained the eyes was certainly a mask--as expressionless.

Then it came to Jakey Faust that there was nothing left to do but fill the Lauzanne column in his book with the many bets that would come his way and make much money.

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

When a man strives against Fate, when realization laughs mockingly at his expectations, there comes to him a time when he longs for a breathing spell, when he knows that he must rest, and wait until the wheel of life, slow-turning, has pa.s.sed a little through the groove of his existence. John Porter had been beaten down at every point.

Disastrous years come to all men, whether they race horses or point the truthful way, and this year had been but a series of disappointments to the master of Ringwood. After Lucretia's win in the Eclipse, Porter did not land another race. Lucretia caught cold and went off. He tried Lauzanne twice again, but the Chestnut seemed thoroughly soured. Now he was back at Ringwood, a dark cloud of indebtedness hanging over the beautiful place, and prospect of relief very shadowy. If Lucretia wintered well and grew big and strong she might extricate him from his difficulties by winning one or two of the big races the following summer. About any of the other horses there was not even this much of promise.

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

"I'm going to give him away," her father had replied; "I can't sell him--n.o.body would buy a brute with such a reputation." This word brought to Porter's mind his chief cause of resentment against the Chestnut.

The public having got into its head that Porter was playing coups, generously suggested that he was pulling Lauzanne to get him in some big handicap light.

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

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

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

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

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

Langdon's horses, so silently controlled by Philip Crane, Banker, had been put in winter quarters at Gravesend, where Langdon had a cottage.

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

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

Many things had crowded into this year of Crane's life. The bank, doing but a modest business always, was running so smoothly that it required little attention from the owner. This was one reason why he had thrown so much subtle energy into his racing; its speculation appealed to him.

The plucking he had received as a moneyed youth rankled in his heart.

The possession of such a faithful jackal as Langdon carried him to greater lengths than he would have gone had the obnoxious details been subject to his own execution. Though conscienceless, he was more or less fastidious. Had a horse broken down and become utterly useless, he would have ordered him to be destroyed without experiencing any feeling of compa.s.sion--he would have dismissed the matter entirely from his mind with the pa.s.sing of the command; but rather than destroy the horse himself, he probably would have fed him. And so it was with men. If they were driven to the wall because of his plans, that was their own look out; it did not trouble Philip Crane.

Porter he had known simply in a business way. From the first he had felt that Ringwood would pa.s.s out of its owner's possession, and he had begun to covet it. The Lauzanne race had been Langdon's planning altogether.

Crane, cold-blooded as he was, would not have robbed a man he had business dealings with deliberately. He had told his trainer to win, if possible, a race with Lauzanne, and get rid of him. That Langdon's villainous scheme had borne evil fruit for John Porter was purely a matter of chance selection. There was a Mephistophelean rest.i.tution in not striving to wrest the Eclipse from Lucretia with The Dutchman.

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

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

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