"Well, she wouldn't go along with me to the track over at St. Asaph across the Potomac, and so I went alone. The man I had met in the shooting gallery had told me so earnestly about this Jodan horse that I couldn't fail to be impressed by his words, and when I found that my wife was so opposed to Jodan's chances was more than ever determined to play him, for I'd learned something about the nature of the feminine hunch, don't you see?
"It like to've carried me off my feet when I saw the price on the blackboards against Jodan. Jodan was quoted at 150 to 1. The favorite was at 3 to 5 on, and all of 'em, the whole fourteen in the race, were at shorter prices than Jodan. I clutched the $50 that I had intended playing on Jodan, thinking that he'd be about 10 to 1 or something like that, and I just thought and thought and thought over the thing.
"'By jimminy!' said I finally, after standing over in a corner alone for a while, thinking, 'my wife may be right about Jodan, and all that, but I came over here to play Jodan, and I'm going to play him or just bust, win or lose!'
"Then I went over to a bookmaker, got a $1500 to $10 ticket on Jodan to win. 'Take that hay out of your hair, pal,' the bookmaker said to me when I passed my money over—and went up to the stand to see the race, thinking all the time what a serious matter it is to take a chance on playing against the feminine hunch.
"Jodan, after being practically left at the post, came out of the clouds in the stretch, and won the derned old race on the wire by a nose from the favorite, and when I hired a rig and packed those $1500 over to my wife the way she warmed up to her one and only Theophilus was sure a caution.
"The feminine hunch," concluded the man with the ravelled cigar and the granulated eyelids, "is all right when you copper it, but it won't do to play it open. Am I right?"
"No," said the two men in the seat, and then the rush to get off the train began.
[A RACE HORSE THAT PAID A CHURCH DEBT.]
He Was Thought to Be a No-Account Cripple, but He Proved Himself to Be "All Horse" When Called Upon.
"A friend of mine who came here from Chicago for the Bennings meeting was telling me about that Jim McCleevy mule," said an old-time owner of thoroughbreds who is wintering a string of jumpers and breaking a bunch of yearlings out at the Bennings track. "That makes a queer story, and there are some strange things connected with the thoroughbred game, at that. This McCleevy horse wasn't worth a bag of moist peanuts at the beginning of the present racing season. He couldn't beat a fat man. He had never been in the money. He was a legitimate thousand-to-one shot in any company. He was the candidate for the shafts of a brick cart, when by some odd chance he passed into the possession of a nice young woman who was going to school somewhere in the State of Iowa. The girl's uncle was mixed up some way or another with the turf, and he bought the McCleevy plug for a joke, paying a few dollars for him. In a spirit of fun he wrote to his niece that he had bought Jim McCleevy in her name, and that the horse belonged to her and would be run in her interest. The young woman didn't know the difference between a race-horse and a chatelaine bag. She was an orphan, and struggling to get an education for herself. Her ambition was to take a course at a woman's college, but, up to the time of this incident, which lasted throughout the spring and summer, her hope of putting this ambition over the plate was pretty shadowy, and it looked like it was up to her to get a job teaching a country school in order to support herself. But she wrote to her uncle that she accepted the gift of the no-account racer with gratitude, and inquired if the horse could not trot right fast, for, if so, she might be able to dispose of him to some well-to-do farmer in her neighborhood.