_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!"