IV
But how delicate is the process of backing your fancy! The planting of a commission—what tender and efficient work before it will flower! That sixth sense of the racing man, which, like the senses of savages in great forests, seizes telepathically on what is not there, must be dulled, duped, deluded.
George Pulcher had the thing in hand. One might have thought the gross man incapable of such a fairy touch, such power of sowing with one hand and reaping with the other. He intimated rather than asserted that Calliope and The Parrot were one and the same thing. “The Parrot,” he said, “couldn’t win with seven stone—no use thinkin’ of this Callĭōpe.”
Local opinion was the rock on which, like a great tactician, he built. So long as local opinion was adverse, he could dribble money on in London; the natural jump-up from every long shot taken was dragged back by the careful radiation of disparagement from the seat of knowledge.
‘Jimmy’ was the fly in his ointment of those balmy early weeks while snapping up every penny of long odds, before suspicion could begin to work from the persistence of enquiry. Half-a-dozen times he found the ‘little cuss within an ace of blowing the gaff on his own blinkin’ mare’; seemed unable to run his horse down; the little beggar’s head was swellin’! Once ‘Jimmy’ had even got up and gone out, leaving a gin and bitters untasted on the bar. Pulcher improved on his absence in the presence of a London tout.
“Saw the trial meself! Jimmy don’t like to think he’s got a stiff ’un.”
And next morning his London agent snapped up some thirty-threes again.
According to the trial the mare was The Hangman at seven stone two, and really hot stuff—a seven to one chance. It was none the less with a sense of outrage that, opening the Sporting Life on the last day of September, he found her quoted at 100—8. Whose work was this?
He reviewed the altered situation in disgust. He had invested about half the stable commission of three hundred pounds at an average of thirty to one, but, now that she had ‘come’ in the betting, he would hardly average tens with the rest. What fool had put his oar in?
He learned the explanation two days later. The rash, the unknown backer, was ‘Jimmy’! He had acted, it appeared, from jealousy; a bookmaker—it took one’s breath away!