"'S'pose, you yellow devil, that I don't cough up a red of it? What then?'
"He grinned and rolled his eyes over toward the judges' stand.
"'I'd jes' nachully be obleeged tuh do de bes' I could fo' de proteckshun o' de spoht o' racin,' he replied.
"The horses were still making false breaks at the post and it was too late for me to hop into the ring and lay enough down to win $2,500 for the yellow man and still have $5,000 to the good myself. It was a sore game, that, but I had to stand for it.
"'All right,' I said to the darkey, 'you've turned this trick and you'll get the $2,500. But you want to go West with it, as you say you are, or I'll get a night doctor or two on your trail. Chop away from here and I'll see you after the race.'
"'I knows yo' will, boss,' said the yellow man, giving me that triumphant grin of his, and he turned and went down the rail to take in the race. Race, did I say? Oh, it wasn't a race. My horse got away from the post three lengths to the bad, and he trailed after the bunch dismally all the way around to the stretch turn, but I never had a quake. I could see, if nobody else could, that my boy was ripsawing the horse's mouth, and I knew it was all right. At the stretch turn the boy let out a couple of links and the nag joined the front bunch. The boy drew it fine, as I had instructed him, and won by a short head, and it was funny to see the wise guys from Washington who had scattered all kinds of Government-earned money all over the ring turning mental flipflaps of despair. I watched to see if there'd be any holler about anything when the boy weighed in, but there wasn't, and the race was confirmed all right. I went around and did my own collecting, and several of the poor devils of bookies had to go out of business after the rest of the boys that I had put on to the thing came along and cashed their tickets. I found my yellow man waiting for me on the outside of the ring, and when I got him into the shadow I gave up the $2,500. I saw that he got a ticket and started for San Francisco the next day. I felt so sad when I heard a few months later that in an attempt to learn how to smoke hop out there, to add to his jag répertoire, he had died in a Chinese joint after hitting up thirty-six pills. I felt so sad."
The ex-ringer operator was plunged in meditation for a while, the others remaining sympathetically silent, and then he resumed in another strain.
"Next to the worst jolt I ever got—and the worst was the time down in Maryland when one of my plugs with two whitewashed barrel spots and a whitewashed forehead star got rained on at the post, practically out of a clear sky, and the spots got washed out, and I had to get out of the State of Maryland over fences—next to that jolt, the way one of my boys threw it into me at a county fair meeting in West Virginia was pretty bad. I had tongue-hammered that kid pretty hard two or three times at that meeting for winning when his mounts weren't due to win and I didn't want 'em to win, and he got sulky. I tried to coddle him up a bit, for I had a real good one to pull off on the last day of the fair, and I thought I had him all right on my staff again. The real good thing was a horse of mine that I had entered in the final race, which the jays down there called a mile race for the 1:55 running class.' 1:55! I had a skate with me down there that could just common canter a mile in 1:45, and he could have done it in three seconds better if pinched at any time. I had had the plug lose three or four races during the fair meeting, and he wasn't as good as Chinese money in the estimation of the West Virginians by the time the race that he was going to win came around. My boy was to have the mount, and our mutual confidence seemed to be restored by the time the good thing was booked to happen. But he had an ice-pick up his sleeve for me all the time."
"'Didn't try with the horse, and lost, eh?' asked one of the ex-ringer worker's listeners.
"'Oh, no, it wasn't that,' was the reply. The horse won by a tongue, and the boy gave him a beautiful tight ride to keep him from winning further off. But he put every grafter that he knew, and he knew 'em all at the fair meeting next to what was going to happen, and made split terms with all of them. That is, he put 'em on, on condition that he was to get half of each man's winnings on the race. Now, I had figured on picking up $8,000 or $10,000 easy on that good thing, and I had lain awake nights making plans to meet possible hitches. It certainly wasn't treating me right, the way that boy did. I thought I'd get as good as 25 to 1, anyhow, at the first betting. I intended to take a mess o' that and then wait for the betting to go up, for I confidently expected, and had a right to expect, that the nag's price, in view of what the farmers down there thought of him, would go up to 50 or 100.