There were a chorus of curses.
“That hound of his ain’t got a chanst,” declared Kinsley. “It’s ten to one he runs the wrong way of the track.”
“He’s the worst actor at the post on the circuit,” said Stanley.
“He’s liable to bust up the start.”
“Better pick one of our horses to bump him and put him over a fence,” snarled McGuire. “He ain’t got any business in this. He knows Attorney Jackson can beat him.”
It was a testimonial to his reputation for honesty that not one of the assembled crooks even suggested asking Gaines to enter the conspiracy. They cursed him for an interfering old fool, they cursed his stubbornness, they cursed his idiocy in still insisting that Sword of Gideon was a stake horse, they cursed his supposed parsimony and believed he had entered his aged racer in the hope of winning a few dollars by getting the place or show money. Not one suspected that anything excepting blind chance had caused him to enter his horse in the race.
They were wrong. Hardshell Gaines, with an unsullied record of fifty years on the turf, had heard something. He had seen Long in conference with some owners, and when the same owners rushed to enter their horses in the overnight handicap Gaines’ suspicion had become certainty. He had entered Sword of Gideon in the handicap, and for an hour afterward had rubbed and stroked the old campaigner, and as he rolled bandages around the bad leg of the old horse and applied liniment to his throat, he had hummed a hymn.
Occasionally his voice rose in song and he sang of the time when “the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” It was after dark when he entered the Laclede downtown and sought out the assistant starter.
“Joe,” he said solemnly, “I have been in this game, man an’ boy, clost to fifty year and tried to run straight and do right as a hossman and a Baptist. No man can say James Buchanan Gaines owes him a cent or ever done a dishonest thing. I’ve done had a wrastle with my conscience, and consarn me if I believe it’s wrong to skin a skunk!”
Joe nodded approval.