Taking Chances Part 2

"Anyhow, for all that, I'm still regretting that I overlooked this chance I'm speaking of. I was in a Dearborn street hang-out for racing men one night, along toward the wind-up of the racing season, when a boy came inside and told me a man out at the front door wanted to see me. I went out and found a drunken stable hand waiting for me. He was employed as a general stable roustabout by the owner of a California string, and I had befriended the man in the paddock a few days before when he was engaged in a rum fight with another stable hand. He was getting the worst of the sc.r.a.p when I stepped in and pulled his antagonist off of him. It didn't amount to anything, this, but the tank stable hand that was waiting for me outside of the Dearborn street place in the rain seemed to feel grateful to me for it.

"'h.e.l.lo, Bill,' said I to him, 'what's up?'

"'Got fired this afternoon,' he replied.

"'Broke?' I asked him.

"'I didn't hunt you up to touch you, boss,' he said. 'I got a good thing I want to give to you. You've been square to me. The good thing's to come off to-morrow, and n.o.body's on. I'm preaching on it because I've been dropped from the track just for getting a skate on, and because I want to put you next, that's been on the level with me.'

"'You can pa.s.s me up,' I told the man. 'I don't play the sure ones, you know.'

"'But this is ripe, and it's going to happen,' persisted the man. 'It's a baby. It's a looloo. It's a cachuca. It's that filly Mazie V. in the two-year-old race to-morrow. You know who's stable she belongs in. I heard the chaw about it this afternoon before I got fired, and they didn't get on to it that I was listening. Mazie V.'s going to walk in to-morrow. No dope, but she's fit. She worked three-quarters in .15 flat early yesterday morning when n.o.body was looking, and she's on edge.

They're going to burn up the books with it. I know that n.o.body can tout you, and I'm not trying to tout you. But here's a chance, and I came down to let you know.'

"Well, of course I had to thank the man, but I couldn't help but grin at him at that.

"'How long have you been rubbing 'em down?' I asked him.

"'I've been around the horses since I was ten years old,' he replied.

"'And still so easy?' I couldn't help but say. 'Well, I won't say anything of what you've told me so as to queer the price, if there's any play on Mazie V., but, of course, as for myself, I pa.s.s it up; thanks all the same to you. Need any money?'

"No, he didn't want any money, he said. He had simply hunted me up to put me on to one of the best things of the meeting, and he shambled off.

"When the books opened for that two-year-old race the next day, Mazie V., a clean-limbed filly that had never shown a particle of cla.s.s, opened up the rank outsider in a big field, which included some very fairish two-year-olds. I looked the books over, not because I was betting, but just out of habit, and I saw that every nag in the race was being played but Mazie V., the 150 to 1 shot.

"'If they're going to burn the bookies out on Mazie V., I thought, amusedly, 'it's a wonder the stable connections don't take some of this good 150 to 1.'

"As I was thinking this over, the ex-stableman who had hunted me up with the Mazie V. good thing the night before plucked me by the sleeve. He was several times as drunk as an owl, and I didn't care to talk with him.

"'Are you down?' he asked me, lurching. 'Because 'f you ain't, you're campin' out, an' that's all there is to it.'

"'Go and take a sleep,' I told him, and pa.s.sed on. But he didn't want any sleep. Instead, he drunkenly mounted a box that he found in the betting ring, and started to make an address to the hustling bettors.

"'Hey!' he shouted, 'if you mugs want to git aboard for the barbecue, play Mazie V. She's going to be cut loose. She's a 1 to 10 chance. She's going through. It's a cinch.'

"The crowd guyed him.

"'It's so good,' shouted the poor devil, 'that I just put the last $8 I got on earth on her to win-not to show, but to win. Hey! I'm not touting. I'm trying to give you all a win-out chance. You needn't think because I ain't togged out that I'm a dead one on this. Even if I have got a load along, why'--

"Just then somebody, probably an interested party, kicked the box from under the man and he went sprawling. That closed him up. The crowd roared, but not a man in the gang, of course, put down a dollar on Mazie V. If any of the pikers had even a dream of doing such a thing the stable hand's drunken recommendation of the filly switched them off.

Just before the horses went to the post the $5 bills of people that weren't pikers, but stable connections, went into the ring in such quant.i.ties on Mazie V. that she closed at 100 to 1 in a few of the books, and at much smaller figures in most of the others.

"Well, the way that little filly Mazie V. put it all over her field was something ridiculous. The race was something easy for her. There was nothing to it but Mazie V. She got away from the post almost dead last, and then picked up her horses at leisure, revelling in the heavy going, and, loping up in the last sixteenth, walked in with daylight between her and the favorite. It was one of the killings of the Chicago racing season, and the books were soaked to over $20,000 on $5 bets.

"'That certainly is hard money to lose, to say the least,' I heard poor Mike Dwyer mumble on the day that he took 1 to 15 on Hanover, putting down $45,000 to win $3,000, and Hanover got himself disgracefully beaten by Laggard. And that's what I think about that Mazie V. good thing-hard money not to have won."

THIS SON OF FONSO WAS OF NO ACCOUNT.

_But When He Did Take It Into His Head to Run One Day, the Bookmakers Were Damaged._

An old-time trainer, who is trying out a bunch of yearlings and keeping up a lot of old campaigners out at the old Ivy City track near Was.h.i.+ngton, was chewing wisps of hay the other afternoon and thinking aloud.

"One of the things that I can't exactly figure out," said he, "is whether I'm a ringer-worker or on the level. That proposition has been bothering me a heap in the middle of nights right along since the fall of '87. I got into the center of a game then that has kept me apologizing to myself ever since. And, then, again, that plug wasn't a sure-enough proper ringer. And I didn't put him over the plate, either.

My end of it was only to cop out a few, and all I had to do was to--

"Well, anyhow, I went down to a yearling sale in Kentucky for the man I was training for in 1885. There were some Fonso bull-pups to be auctioned off, and the boss wanted a Fonso or two. You remember Fonso, don't you? He's the old nag, a great one in his times, who got the blue ribbon only the other day at the age of twenty-three for being still the finest specimen of a thoroughbred in Kentucky. The boss wanted a couple of Fonsos and I went after them. I got him two and myself one. The one I got was the worst-looking he-scrag that ever wore hoofs. He was out of a good mare, but he upset all the calculations of breeding. He was the worst seed in looks that ever I clapped my eyes on; and I've been fooling with yearlings for a quarter of a century. He was an angular swayback, leggy, low-spirited, thick-headed, and as fast as a caterpillar. Yet I bought him. I didn't expect ever to make anything out of him, but I was pretty flush then, and I didn't want to see a Fonso pulling a dray if there was a chance in a thousand of making anything out of him. That colt was a joke. The whole crowd gave him the hoot when he was led into the auction ring, and I couldn't hold down a grin myself when I sized up the poor mutt of a camel, the worst libel on a great sire that ever crawled into an auction ring for a bid. The whole gang jeered me when I offered $100 for the skate. I didn't blame 'em. But I led the colt out, put him in a stall, and then went back to the sale. I got two high-grade Fonsos for my boss, and they won themselves out for him twenty times over in the next three years. But they don't figure in this story.

"I went at my freak Fonso right away to see if anything could be done with him. I devoted more time to that one than I did to any of my two-year-olds or three-year-olds in training, hoping that he might have something up his sleeve and that it could be dug out of him with careful handling. It was no go. I couldn't get him to do a quarter in better than 35 seconds. Bat or steel had no effect on him. He had a hide like a rhinoceros, and he made the exercise boys weary. Here was a colt born a Fonso, out of a mare that had been of stake cla.s.s when in training, that was no better than a truck-horse, and at the end of two weeks I gave him up. A circus came along to Lexington, where I had my string, and with the circus, in charge of the performing horses, was an old trainer friend of mine from the St. Louis track who had been chased into the show business by a long run of hard luck. I took him out to look over my bunch, and when he came to the Fonso colt he laughed.

"'Where did you get that world-beater?' he asked me.

"'Oh, that's a Fonso colt that I picked up down the line at a sale a while back,' I told him.

"He didn't exactly call me a liar, but he looked as if he wanted to.

Then I told him all about the colt. Like most trainers, he had the blood and breeding bug pretty bad under his bonnet, and he tried to throw it into me that I wasn't giving the colt a fair shake. Told me a lot of stuff that I already knew about some great racehorses that couldn't get out of their own way as yearlings, and tried to convince me that this Fonso thing of mine was liable to fool me up a whole lot as a two-year-old.

"'Well, he doesn't get oats at my expense until he's ready to race,'

said I. 'If you think his chances at next year's stakes are so devilish big, he's yours for a quarter of a hundred.'

"'I've got you,' said my friend with the show. 'I'll take him along, anyhow. It's worth that much to a man to be able to say to himself as he smokes his pipe after his work's done that he's got a Fonso colt of his own. And I'll bet you an even $100 that I get one race out of that swayback, anyhow, before he's two years older.'

"I didn't take him. I was disgusted with my hundred dollars' worth of Fonso, and I was glad to get the $25 that my friend in the show business gave me for him. He took the mutt away with the show, and I forgot all about that sentimental purchase of mine for a couple of years.

"I hadn't any killing luck during those two years. In fact, the game went against me pretty strong. Most of the string that I had in training went wrong or showed themselves platers, and when the boss decided to quit racing I was up against it completely. I had two or three platers of my own that made their oats money and a little more, and these I raced on the St. Louis track, pulling down a purse once in a while, and getting second money often enough to keep me in coffee and sinkers. When the St. Louis game closed down at the end of September, a number of us that had small strings struck out for the bush-meetings in nearby States. I s.h.i.+pped my three to a metropolis on the banks of the Missouri River where a State fair was about to be held and where $200 purses were offered for running races. I figured my three lobsters to be as good as any for the bush-meetings, and I calculated on getting one or two of the purses at this State Fair.

"I got into the town-they call it a city out there-with my horses three days before the State Fair was to begin. On the day that I got there a circus that had been exhibiting in the town for two days wound up its season and started East for its winter quarters. I saw the boarded-up wagons pa.s.sing through the streets on their way to the freight depot. I was watching the dead procession when my circus friend, the man on whom I had worked off my no-account Fonso colt, picked me out of the crowd and came up to me. The circus moving out was the one he had been attached to when last I saw him and sold him the colt.

"'h.e.l.lo,' said I, 'how many stakes have you pulled down with that one up to date?'

"He dug his hands into his pockets and grinned but made no reply.

"'Have you still got that colt?' I asked him.

"'Yep,' said he.

"'Going to take him along with you to the show's winter headquarters?' I inquired.

"'Sh-sh-s.h.!.+' said he. 'I'm not going along with the show. I quit 'em here. Season's over. I've got some business here next week, anyhow. I'm going to race that Fonso on the Uncle Tom circuit, beginning with the State Fair here.'

"Of course, I couldn't do anything else but prod him, and I did.

"'Fact,' said he, seriously. 'Got him entered in the first race on the card-mile.'