‘Sad business, Denzil, this!’ exclaimed Jack Podgers as he dashed into the private parlour of the De Vere Arms. ‘Here’s a private telegram, and here a special edition of a sporting paper. Both agree as to the facts.’
Jasper glanced at the telegram and at the paragraph. Yes. A most unfortunate accident, due to the carelessness of a porter, had occurred to Brother to Highflyer, just as that noble horse was being led from his box to the platform. Mr Splint, the eminent veterinary surgeon, summoned in hot haste, had examined the off fore-leg, and had expressed a positive opinion; in deference to which Mr John Knavesmire the trainer and Mr Wylie the owner had reluctantly decided to withdraw the name of Brother to Highflyer from the list.
‘The race naturally must be won by the other favourite, The Smasher,’ said Captain Prodgers with a grim smile.
CHAPTER X.—WHAT HAPPENED AT PEBWORTH.
From early morning the usually sleepy streets of quiet Pebworth had been disturbed by the shouts of bawling hoarse-voiced vendors of so-called ‘correct’ cards, purporting to furnish accurate information as to the names, weights, and colours of the riders, the nomenclature and ownership of the horses, and other particulars relating to the forthcoming race. Some of these itinerants were in faded red jackets that had felt the dust and the rain on every race-course in Great Britain; others were in tattered fustian, stained by the wet grass of the moorside, where the foot-sore wretches had been sleeping for a few hours after their weary tramp across country. It might have been opined that gold had been discovered in Dartmoor, and that diggers were hurrying up like so many eagles to the prey, so many were the uncouth groups that flocked in. Some of the pilgrims were the veriest human vermin that cumber the earth. There was the thimble-rigger, whose stock-in-trade consisted of the tiny board or slender table, which his unacknowledged associate is carrying now, with the peas and the thimble in his pocket. There were the proprietors of the roulette boards, and the manipulators of the ‘three card trick,’ so dangerous to unwary youth. There were gipsy fortune-tellers, dark-eyed, yellow-kerchiefed, and long-haired gipsy men, laden with sticks to be pelted at cocoa-nuts propped on an ash-wand, or at Aunt Sally with her time-honoured pipe.
All the beggars, street-singers, and sellers of toys or gingerbread in the west of England seemed to have been drawn to Pebworth as steel filings are attracted to a magnet; and with them arrived many a scowling ruffian in baggy slop-suit, or slinking fellow in greasy garments of threadbare black, whose object could hardly have been the wish to witness a contest of strength and speed between two or more gallant horses. Probably the man in black was one of those miserable beings who bet with chance customers, and if they lose, pay in person if not in purse, braving kicks, ducking, and ill-usage, in hopes of five or ten ill-got sovereigns. As for the sturdier brute in nailed boots and velveteen, with the knotted bludgeon beneath his arm, it will go hard with him if some half-tipsy owner of a watch be not lightened of it before bedtime.
In poured gigs and carts and carriages of every size and kind, some full of honest holiday-makers, others of thoughtful devotees of the Mammon that presides over the great green gaming-table that we know by the name of a race-course. Among the last-mentioned, who in turf phraseology are termed ‘bookmakers,’ were many, often of gentle birth and nurture, whose feverish life for ten months of the year was one of incessant locomotion, calculation, care, and toil. Some men, sufficiently well educated to see themselves as others see them, yet work harder at the dubious profession they have selected, than does a prosperous doctor or barrister of many briefs—ever on the railroad or in telegraph office, scrambling for make-shift lodgings, suing at the doors of crowded hotels—chilled by the rain of Newmarket, broiled by the sun of Chantilly—and incessantly on the wing to some new race-meeting, goaded on by the ignis-fatuus of Hope.
The carriages were drawn up three deep around the judge’s chair and the stand. Small as the race-course of Pebworth was, it presented a gay and animated appearance. There were the well-appointed drags of every regiment within reach of the little Devonshire town, while the equipages of the county aristocracy were there in unusual numbers. There were the Fulfords, the Carews, the Trelawneys, and the Tresyllians, the Courtenays, and the Penruddocks, all the rural dignitaries of the district. The Earl of Wolverhampton was there with two of his daughters, accompanied by Blanche Denzil, who was confident of her brother’s success. Lord Harrogate too was there on horseback.
No carriage from Carbery was on the Pebworth course that day. Sir Sykes had heard with displeasure that his son was about to take a part in a steeplechase. Jasper’s promise, however, had been given. His name was in print as the rider of Norah Creina, and the baronet saw no help for it. He refused, however, to attend the race with the ladies of his family, and gave but a reluctant consent to his younger daughter’s petition to be allowed to accompany Lady Maud and Lady Gladys to the festive scene. The course itself presented a lively and not uncomely scene, the brilliant beauty of the day adding a witchery to the homeliest objects. The dancing sunbeams gilded the tinker’s squalid tent and the rags of the beggar-boys who ran, clamorous for halfpence, after the horsemen cantering by. It was possible to forget the gathering of bookmakers and betting-men, now hoarsely shouting out their offers of a wager, possible to ignore the sordid greed that had prompted the attendance of so many, and to imagine what the scene may have been two hundred years ago, when races were a novelty, a mere trial of merit between swift and strong horses, minus the thousand and one degrading ingredients which now compose the saturnalia.
Jasper, his gay silken jacket concealed by the loose white overcoat which he wore, elbowed his way through the crowd towards the place where, hard by the weighing-stand, the nineteen horses which were the practical residuum of the sixty-seven entries were being led to and fro.