Taking Chances Part 5

"Donna Rita's lak gettin' money in uh lettuh," said the sport, and every man in the room that heard these words of wisdom from the lips of the man with the magical combination ticket in his pocket, played Donna Rita to win. So here was the sport, enthroned like any monarch of Dahomey, with the crowd surging around him. One of the white sports, waving a roll as big as his fist, elbowed his way through the crowd surrounding the colored sport and flatly offered him $500 for his ticket, after looking at it and seeing that Donna Rita, much the best horse in the next race, had her name inscribed there. It was a temptation, but the sport was game, and stood pat.

"Dis heah ticket ain't fo' sale," he said. "De two thousan's good enough fo' this c.o.o.n."

Another man offered him $800 for his $2 ticket. The offer was declined.

There wasn't a man in the crowd that wasn't rooting for the sport's ticket to wind up all right, and to make their rooting more effective they played Donna Rita to win the last race almost to a man. The less important sports were keeping close to their brother in hue. They wanted to be in at the finish-perhaps to help the sport to celebrate. At post time there was hardly a man at the betting counters. They were all hovering near the sport for luck.

"Off at New Orleans!" shouted the telegrapher, who knew about the sport's ticket by this time, and there was a note of unusual excitement in his voice as he called off the race. "Donna Rita in the lead!"

"Oh, yo' babe, Donna!" shouted all the "spotes" in unison, and "stay right theah, yo' nigguh!" shouted the one particular sport.

"Donna Rita at the quarter by five lengths!" called out the telegrapher, and the poolroom might have been taken for an Emanc.i.p.ation Day festival.

"Donna Rita at the half by five lengths!"

"Ef yo' lubs yo' man, come uhlong!" moaned the sport in ecstasy.

"Donna Rita at the three-quarters by three lengths, Kisme second, Virgie O. third," droaned the operator. "Donna Rita in the stretch by a head!"

The sport rocked to and fro and groaned.

"Virgie O. wins by a nose!" announced the telegrapher.

That settled the combination. The sport's followers fell away from him like autumn leaves from wind-tortured trees.

"They ain't nothin' in this horse-racin' game, is they?" the frequenters of the poolroom said to one another as they slouched out, and the grating tones of the cas.h.i.+ers counting bills soon echoed through the deserted room.

"RED" DONNELLY'S STREAK OF LUCK.

_He "Runs a Shoestring into a Tannery," and Then Gets the Cold Shoulder from the Lady Fortune._

A party of turfmen in Was.h.i.+ngton for the Benning meeting were talking the other evening of the remarkable streak of luck which has enabled Billy Barrick to run a borrowed shoestring of $200 up to an amount which is now said to approximate $100,000 in the last six weeks.

"Barrick's double-ended luck, both at faro bank and horses," said one of the bookmakers in the party, "is a whole lot out of the common. Luck is a full-bred sort of an affair, and it does not often run along hybrid lines. What I mean to say is that the man who has a huge run of luck at one game almost invariably falls into the doldrums and goes all to pieces when he switches to another game. The luckiest men I ever knew on the turf, for example, were the unluckiest card players, and most of them stubbornly spent a good many thousands of their pony winnings before they found this out. Barrick seems to be an exception. He has got into the current, and he could probably get away with the money at fan-tan or Cingalese pool while he's in his present shape. I'm a bit afraid of him just now myself, and when I see his commissioners bearing down on my book I'm sorely tempted to rub the whole slate until I get a chance to rubberneck and find out what they're after. If I were dealing faro bank, so weird has his luck at tiger-bucking been lately, too, that I believe I'd make it a thirty-cent limit when I saw him coming. But he's an exception, as I say. It's the man who sticks to the one game that drives the swaggerest dog-cart and wears the whitest gig-lamps in the long run.

"I remember a chap out in St. Louis who ran a shoestring of five cents up to pretty close to six figures in the summer of 1895. He bucked more games in doing it, too, than Barrick has thus far, but he couldn't go a route, and they ate him up when the whisky got into his head in such quant.i.ties that he saw treble without having a focus on anything. His name was Red Donnelly, and he had charge of the bookmakers'

paraphernalia in the betting ring of the St. Louis fair grounds when the Lady Fortune beamed upon that nickel of his and invited him to bask for a time in her domain. He was a loose-jointed spraddle-shaped sort of a young chap of 25 or so who had been hanging around the St. Louis tracks from his early boyhood. He learned so much about the horses that he could never win anything on them when he played in the ten-cent books made by the railbirds. He handicapped them down to the sixteenth of a pound, and the horse that he put his dime on consequently got beaten, as a rule, by a tongue. He had been holding down the job of a dog-robber for the bookmakers for two seasons before he struck his lead on that nickel. He came out to the track one day, early in June, 1895, with the solitary nickel reposing in the depths of his trousers' pockets, salted there to pay his fare back to the city. He got to pulling the five-cent piece out of his clothes and looking at it longingly by the time the first race was due. He wanted to get down on a race, but there were no five-cent books. The bottom sum accepted by the railbird books was a dime. Red strolled out to the barns and got to pitching nickels with a pack of idle stable boys. The luck was with him from the jump, and when he acc.u.mulated a dollar in nickels he exhibited symptoms of a man suffering from chilblains. His reason for getting cold feet was that he had a good thing in the fourth race, and by the time he had acquired the dollar the betting had begun on the fourth race.

"Red hurtled himself into the ring with his dollar and saw that the price offered against his good thing, the old nag Hush, was 60 to 1.

Donnelly needed a bundle of cigarettes and a few drinks pretty badly, but he was game when it came to sticking to his good things, and he slapped his twenty nickels down on Hush with a bookmaker he knew. He took good-naturedly the mocking hoot which the booky gave him for handing in twenty pieces of that kind of metal, and catapulted himself out to the rail just as the horses went away from the post. The race was really something silly for Hush, in the unwieldy field of nineteen horses. Hush led all the way, and pranced under the wire first in a big gallop, pulled double. The boy had Hush up in his lap all the way.

"Red had some difficulty in collecting his $61. The bookmaker knew him well, knew of his taste for rum, and knew also that few of Red's rare dollars ever found their way to the humble shack of the man's infirm old Irish mother.

"'I believe I'll just pinch this out on you, Red,' said the booky to him, 'and pa.s.s it along to the old lady when I go in to-night. It won't do you any good.'

"'Come to taw,' replied Red. 'I want to put thirty or forty cents down on the next race. I got another good thing in it.'

"The bookmaker reluctantly pa.s.sed Donnelly the $61. Red carefully folded the dollar bill and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he invested the $60, in $10 clips, with six books, on Dorah Wood, in the next race, at 15 to 1. It was a canter for Dorah Wood, and Red knocked the bookmakers silly-they all knew him well from his working around the place-by socking it to six of them for $150 each. A committee of safety was immediately formed around Donnelly, but he couldn't be held down. He tossed a quart of wine under his waist-line, purchased a package of cigarettes made in Turkey for forty cents, and looked over his dope-book carefully. Then he strolled into the ring and bet $900 on Minnie Cee in the last race. Minnie Cee was at 3 to 1, and it was something ridiculous for her. She won on the bit, and Red was $3,660 to the good on that nickel that he had salted away in his homespuns for the return trip to town.

"When Red turned up to collect, Barney Schreiber-he's a big-hearted Barney-had him, as it were, by the scruff of the neck. Barney announced to all of us that he was going to collect for Donnelly, and what Barney said went with us, for we all knew Red's propensities. Donnelly put up a weak growl, but he knew 'way down deep in him that Schreiber could and would take care of the cash better than he could or would. Barney pinched $3,500 of the wad, inserted it in a separate compartment of his wallet, and handed Red $150.

"'I'll just let you have a little change, Red, said he, 'and if you think you can run that up into a tan-yard, go ahead. But I'm a-going to handle this for you the right way. You're not tied enough in your ways to have such a vast sum on your person all at one and the same time.'

"Donnelly didn't demur much. The $150 was a huge sum itself for him, and he, of course, knew that Schreiber would do the right thing with the main bunch. As a matter of fact, Barney deposited the $3500 the next day to the credit of Donnelly's old mother, and Schreiber and the old woman were the only people who knew anything about that end of it for a long time afterward.

"We all gibed and roasted Red about the delirium-tremens finish we foresaw for him, and when he didn't turn up at the track at all on the following day, necessitating the turning of his dog-robbing work over to another man, there was a lot of talk about the tremendous barrel-house toot Red must have gone on down the levee way. That's where we were camping out. When we picked up the papers on turning out the following morning we found a scare-head story in one of them relating in great detail and elaborate diction how one Mr. John S. Donnelly, a gentleman well known on the Western turf, had swatted Ed McGuckin's faro bank, over in East St. Louis, to the tune of $16,000, playing steadily without meals from 7 o'clock on the evening of Monday until 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, when Ed turned the box on him and announced that it was all off for the present. We all shouted 'fake!' when we saw that, but a couple of us hopped into a cab and crossed over to McGuckin's place to see if there was anything in the yarn. Well, there was everything in it.

We found Ed holding his fevered brow and mumbling deep, dark things about d.a.m.ned vagabonds slipping into his layout and running shoe tongues up into leather factories. We expressed our sympathies with Ed, for which we came perilously near being kicked, and then we went back to St.

Louis to hunt up Red. We went over the barrel-house route with a fine-tooth comb, but no Donnelly. Then we decided to drive out to his mother's little old shack. Our route from the levee out there took us through the down-town district, and we both saw Red on the street at once. We drew up alongside the curb, and called him. He was cold sober, and he had $16,210 in bills in his inside waistcoat pocket. We asked him where he was going, and he nodded in the direction of the swellest tailoring establishment in St. Louis. We went along with him, and it was one lovely sight to observe the fabrics Red picked out wherewith to ornament his long, lithe person. He ordered a dozen suits, and then we went with him to the haberdasher's. He was all for green and yellow neckties, pink-striped s.h.i.+rts, and that sort, and we let him have his way. Then he became sleepy. We threw it into him pretty hard about that big bundle of money he had on him, and he finally consented to come along to a bank with us and deposit $14,000 of it in his name. We tried to hold out for having it put in his mother's name, but he wouldn't stand for that. After leaving the bank Red's eagle eye caught sight of the s.h.i.+ny things in a jeweler's window, and he decided then and there that he couldn't go to sleep without having the third finger of his left hand made conspicuous by a three-karat blue-white stone, for which he coughed $500. That left him with about $1500 in his clothes, and we dragged him then into the cab and drove out to his mother's little old shanty. The old lady had her little talk with Barney Schreiber about the $3500 by that time, and the to-do she made over her 'bye Johnnie' was worth the ride to see. When we told her about the other bunch that Red had copped and that we had plunked it into the bank for him, the quant.i.ties of corned beef and cabbage which she threw into the pot for the dinner which she wanted us to remain to share with her and her phenomenal son were amazing.

"Well, Donnelly astonished us all for a couple of weeks by his extraordinary conduct. He would ride out to the track in a hack, with a gilt-stamped cigarette in his face, attend to his job as usual around the betting-ring-that is, he'd supervise, for he quickly acc.u.mulated a staff of wors.h.i.+ping touts and hangers-on-and then he'd go up into the grand-stand to exhibit his cake-walk clothes and look at the races. He didn't put a bet down on a horse for two weeks. He remained pretty sober all the time, too. We joshed him about the frigid pedals he had suddenly got, but he only pa.s.sed along with the remark: 'I'm letting 'em run for O'Flaherty. Nothin' doin'.'

"We waited for the crash, but it didn't seem to come on schedule time.

One afternoon he called me aside and showed me his bank-book. It showed an additional deposit of $5000, making the total $19,000.

"'When did you pick up that new roll?' I asked him.

"'Went up against the wheel at Terhune's last night, and yanked it out in three hours,' he said.

"'When did you learn to play roulette?' I asked him.

"'Last night,' he replied.

"Along toward the end of June Donnelly turned up at the track one afternoon with a light in his eye. He went out into the paddock and spent three-quarters of an hour looking at a horse and by that time the third race was due. Red came into the ring and spread $1000 around on Madeira at 10 to 1. It was a maiden two-year-old race, but Madeira romped in two lengths to the good. That night Red, still moderately sober and level-headed, had $29,000 to his credit in the bank. We began to figure with a new brand of dope on Donnelly's game and to consider the possibility of his becoming a real fixture. A lot of owners with b.u.m skates tried to work them off on Donnelly at big prices, but he only pa.s.sed them the cold-storage smirk. This gave us an additional line of thinks with regard to what we thought was his increasing shrewdness.

Besides, you see, Red began to be right good to us. He told us all very soberly one afternoon that he had a good thing, but that he didn't want to hurt his own ring, so he'd send his money to the out-of-town poolrooms. The good thing was David, who won the last race in a walk at 15 to 1, and Red cleaned up $15,000 on that.

"Right at this point, Schreiber and some other people got at Donnelly and tried to induce him to either invest a part of his money-he had almost $50,000 then-in a string of useful horses, to be put into the hands of a competent trainer-or to have the whole bundle properly invested in some sort of annuity, tie-up scheme whereby, when Red's streak of luck fizzled out, he wouldn't have to go back to buying cigarettes by the cent's worth. The man was too bull-headed, though, to listen to anything like this. He did, however, buy his old mother a fine house and install her in it, and the old lady had stiff black silk dresses and poppy-ornamented bonnets galore in which to go to ma.s.s.

"Meanwhile Red was going up against all kinds of games around town every night, and it honestly appeared as if he couldn't lose. c.r.a.ps, stud poker, draw, wheel, red and black, mustang, bank-all seemed to be right in Donnelly's mitt. A lot of us used to turn up where he was bucking things every night, and, following his play, we always got the good end of it. He didn't know much about any of the games, and the idiotic things we had often to do in order to consistently follow his play made us gag, but nine times out of ten them came out right. One man in our party, a bookmaker, who determined to copper all of Red's play at the different games, on the theory that Donnelly's luck had to turn some time or another, almost went broke before he came into the fold and quit coppering.

"All of this time Donnelly had simply been nibbling at the red stuff. By the time his great luck was a month old, however, the booze had nailed him, and he got to throwing in the hooters early in the morning. A man can't drink in the morning and hang on either to luck or judgment. Red came into the ring palpably drunk one afternoon and spread around $20,000 on Strathmeath at even money. None of us wanted to take the money, for if ever there was a rank in-and-outer, that horse was Strathmeath. But Red was insistent and a bit ugly, and we accommodated him. Strathmeath ran third, beaten out by two dogs. That night Donnelly dropped $20,000 more at faro. Then he didn't go to bed for five nights, and at the end of that time he had about $6000 left. I never saw luck drop away from a man like it did from Red Donnelly. For instance, he was whacking at a bank one night, stupefied with hooters of half rye and half absinthe, and he shut one eye so he wouldn't see double and fixed it on the nine spot. He played the nine open for $100 a clip, and lost it twelve straight times. The frowns of the Lady Fortune got his nerve, and he began to play favorites at the track. The favorites went down to inglorious defeat, one after another, for days.

"Some of the right kind of people, including Schreiber, got hold of Red when he had only the $6000 left, landed him in a fix-up ward, and sobered him up. When he came out Donnelly was set up with an interest in an express business. I don't believe he ever saw the inside of the express office more than half dozen times, except to draw what was coming to him. He was at the track all the time the races lasted, and when the season closed he put in his time down on the levee. He never had a day's luck after his big streak up to the last hour of his death, somewhat less than a year after they came his way with a whoop and a rush.

"When the G.o.ddess smiles upon you, you want to stroke her hair, chuck her under the chin and be good to her, for she rarely acts amiable twice to a man who treats her favors wantonly."

AND "RED BEAK JIM" TOOK THE TIP.

_Plunge Made by a Hackman on the Suburban Handicap Won by Kinley Mack._

"We'll get Red Beak Jim to hike us down in his caloosh," said the main guy of the four. The four were job holders in one of the New York city departments, and they were talking about ways and means of reaching the Sheepshead track for the Suburban.

"Good thing," said the three others. "Go on and ask Jimmy for a figure, down and back, for the bunch. Hey, and don't let him d.i.c.ker you out o'

your gilt teeth. Jimmy's a robber."