"'To blazes with casting up!' he said. 'Isn't the last of my cush on the skate, too?'
"I felt like ten cents' worth of dog's meat when I slunk back to the stand to see 'em get off. After fifteen minutes' delay at the post—the starter was a farmer—and Star Boarder blowing like a sand-blast and the foam standing all over him from that little six-furlong sprint, away they went in a line, Star Boarder in the lead! Star Boarder at the quarter by a length! Star Boarder at the half by a length! Star Boarder at the three-quarters by two lengths! Star Boarder in the stretch by three lengths! And if that dog-goned, knock-kneed, bone-spavined, no-account maiden Fonso colt didn't just buck-jump under the wire by six clear lengths of open daylight, you can feed me hay and carrots until the next spring meeting and I'll only say thank you kindly, sir!
"I can't, as I say, make out whether that was a case of ringing or not. Anyhow, it was up to the State fair people to make the holler if any was coming, wasn't it? They didn't. The Rube bookmakers did, but they weren't sustained, and they had to dive into their satchels. Star Boarder is over in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to-day, pulling an old lady around in a phaeton, and still holding down the distinction of being the homeliest son of one of the handsomest sires in the history of the American stud."
[HARD-LUCK WAIL OF AN OLD-TIME TRAINER.]
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.