"So would I ... I kind of like the old coot.... Now what on earth do you suppose he's done to that horse since this morning?"
A few thousand spectators were asking variations of the same question, but one spectator asked no questions at all. The Bald-faced Kid was reduced by stuttering degrees to dumb amazement. He had ignored Old Man Curry's kindly suggestion and had persuaded all and sundry to plunge heavily on Fireball.
It really was not much of a contest. Sky Pilot, on the rail, swung wide turning into the stretch and carried Resolution with him. Like a flash Little Mose shot the black horse through the opening and straightened away for the wire, an open length away for the wire, an open length in the lead.
"Come git him, jocks!" shrilled Mose. "Come git ol' Jeremiah to-day!"
The most that can be said for the other jockeys is that they tried, but Little Mose hugged the rail and Jeremiah came booming down the home stretch alone, fighting for his head and hoping for some real competition which never quite arrived. The black horse won by three open lengths, won with wraps still on his jockey's wrists, and, as the form chart stated, "did not bleed and was never fully extended."
"Well, anyhow," said Mr. Marx, as he wheezed back to his place of business, "Curry won't get anything but the purse again and that'll help some. If he brought a dead horse around here in a wagon, the best he'd get from me would be 1 to 2!"
The judges, of course, were curious. They invited Old Man Curry into the stand to ask him if he had bet on Jeremiah.
"Gentlemen," said he, removing his battered slouch hat, "I give you my word, I never went near that betting ring but once to-day, and that was to bet on a real hoss. 'Elisha!' I says, and I shoved it at 'em. Judges, they laughed at me. They wouldn't take a cent. Not a cent! And I was so mad——"
"Yes, yes," said the presiding judge, soothingly, "but how do you account for Jeremiah bleeding in his work this morning and running such a good race this afternoon?"
"Gentlemen," said Old Man Curry, "I don't account for it. Solomon was the smartest man that ever lived, I reckon, and there was a lot of things he never figured out. I reckon now, if he'd been in this business——"