“Who else is on that boat?” reiterated Binnhart raucously. “I don’t want to hear ’bout no horses, without I’m on my shoeing stool,” he added with a sneer.
“Oh, yes, I know, of course.” The jockey felt the bit himself and adapted his pace to the pressure of control. It seems strange to contemplate, but even such a nature as his has its æsthetic element, its aspirations and enthusiasms, its dreams and vicissitudes of hope. All these just now had a string on them, as he would have phrased it, and were dragging in the dust. He had ridden with credit in several events elsewhere, but he was the victim of intemperance and his weak moral endowment offered special material for the fashioning of a cat’s paw. It was said and believed that he had “pulled” more than one horse in a race, and although this was not indisputable, the suspicion barred him from the employ of cautious turfmen. In connection with his frequent intoxication, it had brought him down at last to work as a groom for his daily bread, and what was to him more essential, his daily dram, in a livery stable in the little inland town of Caxton, some ten or twelve miles distant, for there was scant opportunity in view of the stringent laws against gambling to ply his vocation as a jockey in Mississippi.
“Oh, you are talkin’ about the passenger list. The Cherokee Rose has sure got swells aboard. There are Mrs. Dean and Miss Hildegarde Dean. You must have read a deal about her in the society columns of the newspapers. She won hands down in Orleans las’ winter. Reg’lar favorite, an’ distanced the field.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about the wimmen,” said the smith.
“Well, mebbe old Horace Dean ain’t as rich as some, but they are dressed as winners, sure. I seen ’em in a box at the horse-show—I was there with Stanley’s stable—an’ the di’monds Mrs. Dean had on mos’ put out my eyes.”
“She don’t wear di’monds on a steamboat, I reckon,” put in Mrs. Berridge. “Them I have seen on deck ginerally don’t look no better ’n—’n—me.”
“But you are a good-looker, ennyways, Mrs. Berridge,” said the jockey, and he paid her the tribute of another facetious wink.
“But the woman would carry her di’monds in her trunk or hand-bag,” suggested the shanty-boater.
“Horace Dean ain’t aboard, eh? Let us have the men’s names,” said the smith. He was turning the matter over exactly as if he had it in some raw material on the anvil before him, striking it here and there, testing its malleability, shaping it to utility.
“Oh, well, there’s one of the Ducies, the fellow that has been abroad so long—registers from Lyons, France. Adrian Ducie.”