“Anything you like if you give me the time. She’s a clinker, or I am getting blind. It’s a real pleasure to train a horse like that now, after the blessed lot of cab hacks I get brought here. You’d hardly believe it, but I have men come here and want me to train horses you would be ashamed to put in a hearse at a funeral. And then they wonder they don’t win, and take the horse away to another trainer till they are full up, and then say we are all a lot of sharks.”
“I want her ready for the Cup,” said Alec. “At the weight I think she may do.”
“The time is short, but I will do my best.”
“Do you think she will be fit?”
“Make your mind easy.”
This is how it came about that Huey read in the Referee that Alexander Booth’s filly Bertha was now under the care of the well-known trainer John Vandy, of Randwick.
CHAPTER XVII
THE RELIGIOUS JOCKEY
One afternoon the middle-aged man with bushy whiskers emerged from Huey’s lodgings, and walking to Elizabeth Street, took the tram to Randwick. And he was about that horsey suburb that night and several following nights, frequenting bars and billiard-rooms, listening to the talk, and being taken down at pool as a new chum.
The ears of the bushy-whiskered man were always quick to catch any reference to the Vandy stable, and one night from a groom in a garrulous state of drunkenness, and at the trumpery cost of supplying him with beer, he gained a most minute list of all and every particular of that racing interior. It was a tedious job to a casual listener, this long rambling statement of the hostler, and he would not answer leading questions, but dilated at length about horses at the stable who years ago had lost races they should have won, because his advice was not followed, and won races they might very well have lost, owing to a quiet tip given by him to the boss.
But the bushy-whiskered man was not impatient. He listened to it all, with an occasional interjection, and when at eleven o’clock the landlord turned them out, he started to walk back to Sydney, disdaining a conveyance, for he had much to think about, and the walk helped him.