"Then the poor-but-honest-not owner takes the thousand he already has in his kick, and the thousand the beefing plunger has given him, and spraddles it all over the United States on Juliet at from 5 to 7 to 1.
"Juliet wins by fourteen lengths, and the plunger, with his mouth twitching, hunts up the owner of Juliet. All he gets is a line of chile con carne conversation, and, finally, a puck in the eye.
"'Do others or they'll do you' isn't the way they used to teach it when I went to Sunday-school," concluded the old-time trainer, "but there are occasions when the rule just has to be twisted that way."
[JUST LIKE FINDING MONEY.]
A Bottled-up Cinch That Came Off at One of the Chicago Tracks.
"The first bet that I ever put down on a horse race," said a horse owner and trainer at an uptown café the other night, "was on a horse that stood at 100 to 1 in the betting. It was also the first race I ever saw run by thoroughbreds. I was clerking in a Long Island City grocery store for $8 a week at the time, and I didn't know a race-horse from a ton of coal. I got a couple of my fingers crushed between two salt fish boxes one morning, and I had to lay off from work. I didn't want to hang around my room, and didn't know what to do with myself, and so when a no-account young fellow I knew suggested that I go over with him to Monmouth Park and have a look at the races, I fell in with the proposition. Besides the remains of my previous week's pay, about $3, I had $20 saved up out of my wages, and I kept this in one $20 note in my inside vest pocket. After paying for round-trip tickets for my friend and myself, and for two tickets of admission to the race grounds, I was practically broke with the exception of a few cents, for I didn't count the $20 as available assets. I intended to hang on to that unbroken. Well, I found that all my sporty friend wanted of me was to have me pay his way on the train and into the grounds, for he promptly lost me as soon as we got by the gate. I felt pretty sore at this treatment, not that I wanted his help, for I hadn't the least idea of doing any betting with my savings, but I didn't cotton to the notion of being played for a good thing and then thrown that way.
"I walked around among the crowd with my hands in my pockets, wondering a good deal over the dope talk of the ducks that knew all about the horses and their preferred weights, distances, riders, and so on; it was all Greek to me then. Finally I was shouldered and jostled into the betting ring. It wasn't long before I began to rubberneck at the prices laid against the horses on the bookies' blackboards. Although I didn't know anything about the nags then, I found out afterward, when I had made a study of the game and got a little next to it, that this race I made my first bet on was composed of a cheap mess of fourteen selling platers. They were at all kinds of prices, from 4 to 5 on to 100 to 1 against. The latter price was laid about three of 'em. I didn't exactly understand what the 100 to 1 meant, and so I asked a fellow standing near by to explain it. He looked me over out of the slants of his lamps, thinking, probably, that I was stringing him. When he saw that I was a green one he told me that the 100 to 1 meant that if a 100 to 1 shot won that I had put a dollar on I'd be $100 ahead of the game. This looked pretty good to me. I didn't know anything about horse form or horse quality then, and I thought that one of 'em had just as much chance as another to win. So I picked out the 100 to 1 shot whose name I liked best and elbowed my way up to a booky's stand to put a dollar down on it, holding my $20 bill tightly gripped in my hand. I passed the twenty up to the bookmaker—he went broke, and has been a dead 'un for a good many years now—and said:
"'Give me a dollar's worth of that fourth horse from the top—that one with the 100 to 1 chalked before his name.'
"The booky looked down at me contemptuously, without accepting the twenty I proffered him, and said:
"'I don't want no dollar bets.'