“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I’m going to give him the dope.”
He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He and the girls were nice to me right from the start and clear to the end. I’m not blaming them.
And so he leaned back and I give him the dope on About Ben Ahem. “Don’t bet a cent on this first heat because he’ll go like an oxen hitched to a plow, but when the first heat is over go right down and lay on your pile.” That’s what I told him.
Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a fat man sitting beside the little girl, that had looked at me twice by this time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do but have the nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change places with me so I could set with his crowd.
Gee whizz, craps amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to go and get gay up there in the West House bar, and just because that dude was standing there with a cane and that kind of a necktie on, to go and get all balled-up and drink that whiskey, just to show off.
Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting her smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down out of that grand stand and all around that race track and made a faster record than most of the skates of horses they had there that year.
Because that girl wasn’t any mutt of a girl. What wouldn’t I have give right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozenger, or some liquorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those twenty-five cent cigars in my pocket and right away I give that fellow one and lit one myself. Then that fat man got up and we changed places and there I was, plunked right down beside her.
They introduced themselves and the fellow’s best girl, he had with him, was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was a manufacturer of barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the fellow himself was named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss Lucy Wessen.
I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my trolley. A fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse, and works taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery, and storage business, isn’t any better or worse than any one else. I’ve often thought that, and said it too.
But you know how a fellow is. There’s something in that kind of nice clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had looked at me, awhile before, over her brother’s shoulder, and me looking back at her, and both of us blushing.