The next day he breaks the track record.
I has thought about it a great deal since then and do you know what I figure? I figure it like this. I figure that Jimmie had got on to a secret. There is a secret to doing everything. Like tight-rope walking, or shooting par golf consistent, or whizzing a ball over a tennis net so as it falls just so and dribbles off before it can be got up off the ground. There is a secret to juggling plates and a secret to pole vaulting higher than anybody else. The plates and the pole and the rope and the golf clubs and tennis racquet is all the same. What I mean is you could take half a dozen plates and throw them up in the air and they would land behind the eight ball. But take these here same identical plates and give them to a juggler and he will make them perform without so much as mussing his tie. Why? Because he knows the secret.
Well, then, why can it not be the same way with horses? I am not saying you can take a plow horse and make him win a race any more than that there juggler can juggle plates made out of pig iron. But I am saying, if you know the secret, you can take a race horse and make him win a race. And, like I said, I has thought about it a lot and I figure there is a secret and Jimmie has got on to it. I figure the secret comes to him in a flash like when you know, in a sort of a burst of knowing, that the dealer has aces back to back. Because from that day on he never rides a loser. Except one. I will get around to that in a second.
Saratoga and Hialeah and Havre de Grace and all of them is not no pipe dream. And neither is Ditsy's grand piano, though it is not in no two-room flat. It is in a living room as big as from here to there. One of them two-storied jobs that goes all the way up to the roof. One of them studio living rooms. And done real classy with drapes and hand-carved furniture and lamps with rose silk on the underneath parts of their shades, and them black-and-white, pen-and-ink-looking pictures on the walls, and a rug that feels like it will arch in the middle and purr if you rub it, it is that soft.
Of course, it does not happen pronto. It starts out gradual with Jimmie's name in the papers—"Keep your eye on So-and-So up on So-and-So"—and then it takes a up curve with the sports writers pegging him with this here Wee Willie and first thing you know he is appearing regular Sundays in the rotogravure, him and Ditsy, holding a horseshoe or a shamrock or this here bridle or such as that, and persons are talking about the "Winkie Technique" and children is eating their weight in cereal because Wee Willie Winkie says as how it has got Vitamin Q and for six box tops or reasonable facsimiles thereof the cereal people will send you a handsome, autographed photograph of Wee Willie on Martinique or Little John or Fireflow or some such as them. And his stock is going up like a fever chart. And he is in the bucks. But I mean in, brother.
It changes him some. I do not mean he goes around putting out like he has hung the moon and painted the blue sky; if anything, he quietens down and kind of draws into hisself like. In fact, when he is congratulated on his ability, which he is every time he turns around, he acts like it is making him sick to his stomach. And when the write-ups come out about how modest he is and shy and retiring and how he always tries to give the credit for a win to the horse, why then he acts like he is even sicker and getting no better fast.
Naturally, while most of the publicity is along the lines of sweetness and light, there is some of it as squeezes out a few lemons. Like them that says as how Winkie rides a horse walleyed, and them as hints it is mighty peculiar he does not never lose and a pity, furthermore, because the odds on a horse what is toting Winkie is something to behold in a new all-time low.
Then there is the follow-up gang that always seems to heel to a celeb. Whether he gets to be a celeb by riding horses or eating goldfish or drinking thirty buckets of beer does not make no noticeable difference—they follows. It gets so Jimmie cannot go nowheres without getting the press took out of his pants and he is lucky if the pants is not also took out with the press.
People sends him alligators from Florida and salmon from Alaska. He gets lariats made out of tail hair plaited, and high-heeled boots with tooling. He gets silver spurs, and leather jackets, and saddles, and gloves, and sombreros. He gets blankets and pipes and racks for this and holders for that. He gets a sheep dog, a pair of love birds, a coon cat, a baby leopard, a bearskin rug with the teeth still in it, a stuffed owl, a collection of butterflies, and some twisty horns off a mountain goat all set and glued on a wooden thing to hang on the wall. He gets socks by the gross, handkerchiefs by carloads and one dame even sends him a box of pink silk underwear with his initials stitched in fancy in orchid embroidery.