"When the betting on the race opened I was on hand with my wad. Say, I couldn't get within twenty feet of a one of the twelve bookies doing business. I never saw such a scramble, even in the 50-cent field at Sheepshead. Of course, I thought they were all getting aboard of the favorite, and so I drew back, knowing that if they were playing the favorite my plug would be going up in price all the time. Then I noticed a lot of the educated money, the coin of the grafters that I knew around the grounds, going in, and I wondered if they were Rubes enough to play a favorite in the last race on get-away day. So I drew close to the bookies' stands—as close as I could get—and then I found that they were all writing my horse's name. Nothing but my horse. Not a horse in the race but my horse. It was a staggerer, that was. Of course, I thought of my miffed jockey right away, and I knew he had done it. When I finally was able to get up to the bookies, I found that my plug's price had been played down from 20 to 1 to 9 to 10 on, and I was so disgusted that I stayed off altogether, although I knew my horse was going to win. He did win. The boy couldn't peach because his rake-down had been too big, but he showed me $3,500 in bills an hour after the race, got off twenty feet and told me all about it, and then bolted. I haven't seen him since."
[EXPERIENCES OF A VERDANT BOOKMAKER.]
Wherein It Is Shown That, When There Is "Something Doing," a Bank-roll Is Liable to Be Wrecked.
"I heard somewhere the other day," said one of a party of turfmen who were dining together after the McGovern-Erne fight, "that Billy Thompson, the ex-Duke of Gloucester, is trying to cook up some scheme whereby the legal authorities of New Jersey 'll relent and permit him to start the old Gloucester merry-go-round again. I don't think he'll make it stick, if the story is true, but if Gloucester ever is started again I know a man who'd be very liable to burn the barns down some dark night. I don't think he'd let the Gloucester mud-lark and snow bird race-track operate while he lives.
"In 1880 this man I'm talking about—he had passed up a good grocery business to play the races a year before—had nursed together a wad of about six thousand dollars, and this gave him a bad case of the Sandow vest. He was so chesty over having all that money that he concluded he'd try a whirl on the block. There was only winter racing going on when he got that smoky notion into his hat, and that was at Gloucester. As you fellows know, they used to run 'em there in snow up to the saddle pommels, and the plug that could make out the best without going over the fence, or that didn't become crazy from snow blindness, always yanked down the money at Gloucester—that is, if he was meant to win.
"This ex-sugar-and-tea guy was a dead verdant one at the bookmaking game when he went on the block at Gloucester, but he kept his ears open and his mouth shut, and he had quite a streak of luck, besides, from the go-off, so that at the end of his first week at laying odds he found that he'd averaged a clean-up of about $200 a day. You couldn't see him then without sending up your card, he was so vast and heap-much. He was thinking of going down Dixieway to make a bid on the Belle Meade farm, and, by the end of his third week on the block, when he had run his $6000 into a bit more than $10,000, he was probably the haughtiest gazabo on this side of the Rocky Mountains.
"One day—it was at the beginning of his fourth week at bookmaking—a duck who had a string of good ones—of their kind—chasing the Gloucester will-o'-the-wisp for the poolroom purses, invited himself to take dinner with the ex-grocer with the streak of luck. After they had stored the feed away at the high-riding bookmaker's Philadelphia hotel, the man with the string leaned back in his chair and sprung what he had in mind. He mentioned the star sprinter of his string.
"'You know, of course,' said he confidentially, to the ex-grocer, 'that that nag can eat up any horse down here at three-quarters of a mile. He'd never be beaten at that distance if we let him out every time he went to the post to race. But, of course, if I'd let him win every time out, there would never be any price on him. He'd be a 1 to 20 shot every time he got a lead-pad on, and I'm not going down the line on that kind of prices. Neither am I running my string over at Gloucester for hygienic reasons. Perceive?'
"The new bookie perceived.
"'Well,' this oily geezer went on, 'that horse is entered in a six-furlong sprint to-morrow, as you know. He'll probably be an even-money favorite. He'll lose.'