Tales of the turf

by Hugh S. Fullerton

Tradition was that he came from somewhere in Pennsylvania, as he spoke sometimes of the horses “up the valley”; but beyond the fact that he had a farm in Tennessee, where he bred and trained the horses he raced, nothing was set down in the “Who’s Who” of the turf. He was called Hardshell because he had once explained the difference between the Hardshell Baptists, to which denomination he belonged, and the Washfoots.

He was an old man, thin and poorly dressed in baggy garments which carried the odor of horses and were covered with horse hairs. He loved horses, lived with them and for them and by them. In those days he emerged from his hibernation on the Tennessee farm when racing started at New Orleans and moved northward to Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, and in the fall he retraced the route and disappeared. He usually could be found working with some horse and humming an old hymn, and occasionally, when forgetful, he sang hymns aloud while brushing the horses.

He was honest, which fact set him apart from the majority of the persons who follow horse-racing. According to the unwritten law of the turf, it was all right for a millionaire to race horses for sport and the purses, but a poor man was expected to do the best he could, dodge the feed man’s bill when possible, get a shade the best of the odds, keep under cover the fact that one of his horses was fit for a race until the odds were right, and, if possible, sell one or two colts to the wealthy owners at a fancy price to even the losses on the season.

Hardshell Gaines violated all these rules. He was poor. He bred and raced horses because he loved them and loved the sport. He wagered two dollars on each horse he entered in a race, never more or less. He depended upon winning purses to meet expenses, and he refused to sell his best colts at any price. Each year he emerged from Tennessee with three or four fair selling-platers, a string of two-year-olds from which he hoped to develop a champion, and Sword of Gideon, better known as Swored at Gideon, his alleged stake horse and the pride of the Big Bend stables.

Some of the race followers believed Hardshell to be rich. The suspicious ones (and suspicion has its breeding place on race-tracks) thought the old man laid big bets through secret agents whenever he was ready to win a race. When, at not too frequent intervals, one of his horses won, the wise ones nodded and whispered that old Hardshell had made another killing. Others of us who knew how many of the purses offered in selling races must be won to feed, care for, and transport eighteen or twenty horses, estimated his financial rating more closely. I knew there were times when second or third money in cheap races was welcome to help pay feed bills and jockey fees, and that in several lean times colts had disappeared from the Big Bend stables, having been sold secretly at low prices.

No one ever heard Hardshell complain. His health was always “tol’able,” his horses were always “tol’able fast,” his luck was “tol’able,” and after replying thus to inquiries he hummed a hymn and went away. He never was with the crowd of owners and bookmakers around hotels or restaurants, but lived in the stables; and when little Pete, the diminutive negro jockey, rode out of the paddock, Hardshell, a timothy straw in his mouth and trousers laced into the tops of disreputable boots, sauntered into the betting ring, went to the stand of a bookmaker who had been his friend for years, wagered two dollars that his horse would win, and, without looking to see what the odds were, went down to the rail to root for his horse.

Few knew that Hardshell cherished either an ambition or an enmity—but he did. His ambition was to breed and train a champion colt, and the object of his hatred was Big Jim Long, gambler, bookmaker, sure thing man, and the head of the Long Investment Company—and the ambition and the hatred were associated.

Long was the Long Investment Company so far as advertising and general knowledge went, but the real head sat at a desk in a suite of offices in the lower Broadway district in New York, and, so far as anyone knew, never had been near a race-track. Not even his name was to be found in connection with the Long Investment Company. All letters, remittances, and transfers from branch offices were addressed to James Long, but the man who opened them was Thomas J. Kirtin, whose business, according to the modest lettering on the door of the back room, which opened upon an entirely different corridor from that upon which the Long Investment Company fronted, was “Investments.”

Kirtin’s brain had evolved the idea of applying the all Tontine game to betting upon horse-races, and he had organized the Long Investment Company. In addition to the promise of certain dividends, the company added the appeal to the gambling instinct in human beings. It claimed that the reason persons who bet upon horse-races fail to beat the bookmakers is that the bookmakers have the preponderance of capital. The small bettor could not withstand a run of losses and the gamblers could. It proposed to turn the tables: all bettors were to pool their capital with the Long Investment Company, which, with its elaborate system of doping horse-races, its exclusive sources of information from owners and jockeys who were “interested,” and its perfect system of laying bets which would assure investors of the best odds on each race, would beat the game. Further, it was not as if a bettor wagered all on one race; the company would bet on three, four, possibly six, races a day on different tracks, betting only on inside information, and the winnings would be pooled and divided. One hundred per cent was guaranteed, and more if the winnings were larger.

The public had shied at the proposition at first. Then those who had been lured by golden promises commenced to draw ten, fifteen, even twenty-five, per cent a month on their investments. On one occasion a “dividend” of seventy per cent was declared. The first investors had their money back and still were credited with the original investment. The news was received with incredulity, but as more and greater dividends were declared hundreds and then thousands had flocked to invest. Branch offices of the company, lavishly furnished and equipped with telegraph and telephone communications with all tracks, were established in a score of cities. Money poured into the Long Investment Company by tens of thousands, then almost by millions. Each month the “investors” received astonishing dividends. Some perhaps knew or suspected that the dividends were being paid out of the fresh capital, but, being gamblers, they threw their money into the gamble, betting that they would draw out their principal and more before the bubble burst.