“We’ll ’ave to go and see her run, Jimmy.”
“Not me,” said ‘Jimmy.’
“What! First time she runs! It won’t look natural.”
“No,” repeated ‘Jimmy.’ “I don’t want to see ’er beat.”
George Pulcher laid his hand on a skinny shoulder.
“Nonsense, Jimmy. You’ve got to, for the sake of your reputation. You’ll enjoy seein’ your mare saddled. We’ll go up over night. I shall ’ave a few pound on Deerstalker. I believe he can beat this Diamond Stud. And you leave Docker to me; I’ll ’ave a word with him at Gatwick to-morrow. I’ve known ’im since he was that ’igh; an’ ’e ain’t much more now.”
“All right!” growled ‘Jimmy.’
V
The longer you can bet on a race the greater its fascination. Handicappers can properly enjoy the beauty of their work; clubmen and oracles of the course have due scope for reminiscence and prophecy; bookmakers in lovely leisure can indulge a little their own calculated preferences, instead of being hurried to soulless conclusions by a half-hour’s market on the course; the professional backer has the longer in which to dream of his fortune made at last by some hell of a horse—spotted somewhere as interfered with, left at the post, running green, too fat, not fancied, backward—now bound to win this hell of a race. And the general public has the chance to read the horses’ names in the betting news for days and days; and what a comfort that is!
‘Jimmy’ Shrewin was not one of those philosophers who justify the great and growing game of betting on the ground that it improves the breed of an animal less and less in use. He justified it much more simply—he lived by it. And in the whole of his career of nearly twenty years since he made hole-and-corner books among the boys of London, he had never stood so utterly on velvet as that morning when his horse must win him five hundred pounds by merely losing. He had spent the night in London anticipating a fraction of his gains with George Pulcher at a music-hall. And, in a first-class carriage, as became an owner, he travelled down to Newmarket by an early special. An early special key turned in the lock of the carriage door, preserved their numbers at six, all professionals, with blank, rather rolling eyes, mouths shut or slightly fishy, ears to the ground; and the only natural talker a red-faced man, who had ‘been at it thirty years.’ Intoning the pasts and futures of this hell of a horse or that, even he was silent on the race in hand; and the journey was half over before the beauty of their own judgments loosened tongues thereon. George Pulcher started it.