“Runs a bit, an' then cuts it—won't try a yard. Of course he's sick from the dope, an' the others are a bit fast for him. If we put him in a sellin' race, cheap, he'd have a light weight, an' might do better.”
Porter walked on to Lucretia's stall, and the trainer continued in a monologue to Lauzanne: “You big slob! you're a counterfeit, if there ever was one. But I'll stand you a drink just to get rid of you; I'll put a bottle of whisky inside of your vest day after to-morrow, an' if you win p'raps somebody'll buy you.”
Lauzanne did not answer-it's a way horses have. It is doubtful if his mind quite grasped the situation, even. That neither Dixon, nor Langdon, nor the jockey boys understood him he knew—not clearly, but approximately enough to increase his stubbornness, to rouse his resentment. They had not even studied out the pathology of his descent sufficiently well to give him a fair show, to train him intelligently. They remembered that his sire, Lazzarone, had a bad temper; but they forgot that he was a stayer, not 'given to sprinting. Even Lauzanne's dam, Bric-a-brac, was fond of a long route, was better at a mile-and-a-half than five furlongs.
Lauzanne knew what had come to him of genealogy, not in his mind so much as in his muscles. They were strong but sluggish, not active but non-tiring. Langdon had raced Lauzanne with sprinting colts, and when they ran away from him at the start he had been unequal to the task of overhauling them in the short two-year-old run of half-a-mile. Then the wise man had said that Lauzanne's courage was at fault; the jockeys had called it laziness, and applied the whip. And out of all this uselessness, this unthinking philosophy, the colt had come with a soured temper, a broken belief in his masters—“Lauzanne the Despised.”
Porter's trust that his ill luck had been changed by a win was a faith of short life, for Diablo was most emphatically beaten in his race.
And then came the day of forlorn hope, the day of Lauzanne's disgrace, inasmuch as it de-graduated him into the selling-platter class.
Bad horse as Langdon knew Lauzanne to be, it occurred to him that Porter had planned a clever coup. He had an interview with Crane over the subject, but his master did not at all share the Trainer's belief.
“What price would Lucretia, or The Dutchman, be in with the same lot?” Langdon asked, argumentatively.
“About one to ten,” Crane replied. “But the Chestnut's beating them had no bearing on this race. From what I see of Mr. Dixon, I don't at all class him with you as a trainer—he hasn't the same resource.”
Langdon stood silent, sullenly turning over in his mind this doubtful compliment.