"How about me?"
"You'll do," replied Busyday, candidly. "Name the next."
"His Nibs, the Prince of Melbourne," whispered the freckle-faced, and Busyday glanced at his handicapper's selections. It was the Prince of Melbourne there, too.
"He can't lose," said the shifty-eyed. "Just a pleasant airing fer him. Nothin' to it. W'en you put yer coin down, you might as well stay right here so's t' be foist in line. Put a bunch on."
"I've got some of their money," mused Busyday, "and I won't pass it all back to 'em in a lump."
He got $75 to $30 on Prince of Melbourne to win, bought three cigars for a dollar and a pint of wine, and then suddenly wondered where his townsman was.
"No use trying to look him up, though," he reflected, "in this jam of Indians. Poor old chap, I s'pose he's smashed flatter'n a pancake by this time, without the price of a bottle of pop," and he reproached himself a good deal for not having hung on to his guest when they left the train. He was aroused from his reflections by the yowl, "They're off!" and by the time he got out to the lawn the horses were coming down the stretch.
"His Princelets, with his mouth wide open," he heard the crowd yell, and then his chest expanded, and he muttered to himself: "I always did have a soft spot for that derned old plug!" For the moment he forgot that the Prince of Melbourne happened to be a two-year-old.
"Oh, w'en I pick up a good one as I go along I like t' put me fren's on," buzzed the freckle-faced in his ear, as he made for the paying-off line. Notwithstanding the fact that the Prince of Melbourne's name appeared on his handicapper's list of selections, Busyday very cheerfully gave up one-third, or $25 of his winnings, on the two-year-old to the red-haired youth. The latter soaked the bills away in his white-and-brown-striped trousers, and then he remarked, in an offhand sort of way:
"Well, this is where you pass me up, ain'd it, so?"