Part 1

TALES OF THE TURF

_By_ HUGH S. FULLERTON

[Illustration]

A. R. DE BEER PUBLISHER New York City

Copyright, 1922 by A. R. DE BEER

_All Rights Reserved_

FOREWORD

The publisher feels highly honored at being able, at this time, to present to the American public, from the pen of America’s foremost sports-writer and recognized authority, Hugh S. Fullerton, these stories of the American Turf, feeling sanguine that these tales, saturated with human interest, will be digested with as much pleasure and delight as the author took in writing and the publisher in publishing them.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

All men love a horse who know a horse. The love of contest and struggle forms a kinship between man and horse that exists between no others. It is the gameness, the courage, the fighting spirit of the thoroughbred which arouses in man the finest instincts, and it is these qualities that cause the love of man for the thoroughbred. It is noticeable too, that the thoroughbred horse loves only those human beings who possess those same qualities.

On the race-track we find the only pure democracy of the world, a democracy which includes all classes, all strata of society. It is more liberal, more forgiving of human frailties and human weakness, than any other place, because men who know racing understand how hearts break when the weight cloths are too heavy and the distance too great.

These little tales of the turf are based upon real incidents and real characters. Perhaps those lovers of racing who have lived the life will recognize the characters, and to those I would plead that they extend to them the same broad understanding and forgiveness that they give to the tout, the cadger, and the down and outer in real life.

THE AUTHOR

To Morvich

_SON OF RUNNYMEAD AND HYMIR_

_who has demonstrated to the world that handicaps of birth and breeding are not insurmountable--that the offspring of a sprinter can carry weight over a distance if he has the heart, that neither straight stifles, weight cloths nor distance counts against gameness and courage--this little volume is dedicated._ _THE AUTHOR._

“HARDSHELL” GAINES

“Hardshell” Gaines was the only name we knew him by, although had anyone been sufficiently interested to look through the list of registered owners of race-horses, he would have learned that Hardshell had been christened James Buchanan Gaines. The name might also have furnished a clue as to his age.

Tradition was that he came from somewhere in Pennsylvania, as he spoke sometimes of the horses “up the valley”; but beyond the fact that he had a farm in Tennessee, where he bred and trained the horses he raced, nothing was set down in the “Who’s Who” of the turf. He was called Hardshell because he had once explained the difference between the Hardshell Baptists, to which denomination he belonged, and the Washfoots.

He was an old man, thin and poorly dressed in baggy garments which carried the odor of horses and were covered with horse hairs. He loved horses, lived with them and for them and by them. In those days he emerged from his hibernation on the Tennessee farm when racing started at New Orleans and moved northward to Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, and in the fall he retraced the route and disappeared. He usually could be found working with some horse and humming an old hymn, and occasionally, when forgetful, he sang hymns aloud while brushing the horses.

He was honest, which fact set him apart from the majority of the persons who follow horse-racing. According to the unwritten law of the turf, it was all right for a millionaire to race horses for sport and the purses, but a poor man was expected to do the best he could, dodge the feed man’s bill when possible, get a shade the best of the odds, keep under cover the fact that one of his horses was fit for a race until the odds were right, and, if possible, sell one or two colts to the wealthy owners at a fancy price to even the losses on the season.

Hardshell Gaines violated all these rules. He was poor. He bred and raced horses because he loved them and loved the sport. He wagered two dollars on each horse he entered in a race, never more or less. He depended upon winning purses to meet expenses, and he refused to sell his best colts at any price. Each year he emerged from Tennessee with three or four fair selling-platers, a string of two-year-olds from which he hoped to develop a champion, and Sword of Gideon, better known as Swored at Gideon, his alleged stake horse and the pride of the Big Bend stables.

Some of the race followers believed Hardshell to be rich. The suspicious ones (and suspicion has its breeding place on race-tracks) thought the old man laid big bets through secret agents whenever he was ready to win a race. When, at not too frequent intervals, one of his horses won, the wise ones nodded and whispered that old Hardshell had made another killing. Others of us who knew how many of the purses offered in selling races must be won to feed, care for, and transport eighteen or twenty horses, estimated his financial rating more closely. I knew there were times when second or third money in cheap races was welcome to help pay feed bills and jockey fees, and that in several lean times colts had disappeared from the Big Bend stables, having been sold secretly at low prices.

No one ever heard Hardshell complain. His health was always “tol’able,” his horses were always “tol’able fast,” his luck was “tol’able,” and after replying thus to inquiries he hummed a hymn and went away. He never was with the crowd of owners and bookmakers around hotels or restaurants, but lived in the stables; and when little Pete, the diminutive negro jockey, rode out of the paddock, Hardshell, a timothy straw in his mouth and trousers laced into the tops of disreputable boots, sauntered into the betting ring, went to the stand of a bookmaker who had been his friend for years, wagered two dollars that his horse would win, and, without looking to see what the odds were, went down to the rail to root for his horse.

Few knew that Hardshell cherished either an ambition or an enmity--but he did. His ambition was to breed and train a champion colt, and the object of his hatred was Big Jim Long, gambler, bookmaker, sure thing man, and the head of the Long Investment Company--and the ambition and the hatred were associated.

Long was the Long Investment Company so far as advertising and general knowledge went, but the real head sat at a desk in a suite of offices in the lower Broadway district in New York, and, so far as anyone knew, never had been near a race-track. Not even his name was to be found in connection with the Long Investment Company. All letters, remittances, and transfers from branch offices were addressed to James Long, but the man who opened them was Thomas J. Kirtin, whose business, according to the modest lettering on the door of the back room, which opened upon an entirely different corridor from that upon which the Long Investment Company fronted, was “Investments.”

Kirtin’s brain had evolved the idea of applying the all Tontine game to betting upon horse-races, and he had organized the Long Investment Company. In addition to the promise of certain dividends, the company added the appeal to the gambling instinct in human beings. It claimed that the reason persons who bet upon horse-races fail to beat the bookmakers is that the bookmakers have the preponderance of capital. The small bettor could not withstand a run of losses and the gamblers could. It proposed to turn the tables: all bettors were to pool their capital with the Long Investment Company, which, with its elaborate system of doping horse-races, its exclusive sources of information from owners and jockeys who were “interested,” and its perfect system of laying bets which would assure investors of the best odds on each race, would beat the game. Further, it was not as if a bettor wagered all on one race; the company would bet on three, four, possibly six, races a day on different tracks, betting only on inside information, and the winnings would be pooled and divided. One hundred per cent was guaranteed, and more if the winnings were larger.

The public had shied at the proposition at first. Then those who had been lured by golden promises commenced to draw ten, fifteen, even twenty-five, per cent a month on their investments. On one occasion a “dividend” of seventy per cent was declared. The first investors had their money back and still were credited with the original investment. The news was received with incredulity, but as more and greater dividends were declared hundreds and then thousands had flocked to invest. Branch offices of the company, lavishly furnished and equipped with telegraph and telephone communications with all tracks, were established in a score of cities. Money poured into the Long Investment Company by tens of thousands, then almost by millions. Each month the “investors” received astonishing dividends. Some perhaps knew or suspected that the dividends were being paid out of the fresh capital, but, being gamblers, they threw their money into the gamble, betting that they would draw out their principal and more before the bubble burst.

In New York, Kirtin waited, watching the expansion of the bubble and timing almost to the hour when the crash must come. In his safe nearly fifty per cent of the money received, changed into bills of large denominations, was packed in cases, and in his desk were reservations of staterooms on every vessel departing for Europe in the next fortnight. The bubble had endured longer than he expected. There was more than a million dollars packed in the cases, and more than that amount already had been transferred and deposited in various European banks. He hesitated, undecided as to whether to risk another week of delay--and decided that the time had come to reap the last harvest and permit the gleanings to remain.

On the race-tracks Big Jim Long swaggered and continued his rôle as head of the company spending thousands and talking millions. He was a huge man, with a huge laugh, a round, ruddy face pink from much massage. He wore clothing of striking cut and colors, and his diamonds dazzled the eyes of jockeys and touts. He maintained an air of condescending familiarity with some and patronizing good fellowship with others, and he treated money as dross. Judges, stewards, and club officials watched Long closely and with some disappointment. Rumors that he had bribed jockeys, had influenced owners, that he had fixed races and engineered great killings, were whispered around the tracks, yet the officials could not discover any evidences of his guilt. Big Jim made no denials of the whispered accusations, but blatantly defied the officials to “get anything on him.” Moreover, the bookmakers, who watched his movements even more closely than the racing officials did, knew that he never had bet any large sums at the track, and Big Jim had sarcastically inquired if they thought him a fool to make bets for the company at the tracks, where the odds were made, when the company system was to scatter the bets over a score of cities and get better odds. Such bets as he made at the tracks were for his own account, and generally he lost, so that the small bettors who spied upon him, hoping to learn which horses the company were backing, suspected that he bet to blind them to the real identity of the horses the “killings” were made on. They believed that the Long Investment Company was winning vast sums. As a matter of fact, the Long Investment Company did not bet at all. Kirtin did not believe in gambling. Yet, oddly enough, Big Jim Long believed firmly and unshakably that, if he had complete control of the finances of the company, he could beat the races. He was convinced that with the capital of the Long Investment Company he could corrupt enough jockeys and owners to pay dividends legitimately and make a fortune for himself. Long would have been an easy victim of the game which he was helping perpetrate upon the public. Kirtin had no such illusions. Long had once argued the point with Kirtin in the privacy of the back room in New York, and Kirtin had called him a fool, with variations, prefix and addenda. And, as Kirtin sent him five thousand dollars a week with which to keep up the front of the Long Investment Company, Long had not pressed the point. Neither had he been convinced.

It was against Big Jim Long that Hardshell Gaines cherished the one hatred of his life. It had started when Long sought to amuse himself and his friends by ridiculing Gaines and his stable. He had joked at the old man’s clothes, at his stable, his colors, and his jockey--and then had made the fatal blunder of ridiculing Sword of Gideon, calling him a “hound.”

Perhaps nothing else would have aroused vengeful hate in the bosom of Hardshell, but to speak scornfully of Sword of Gideon was the unbearable insult. The Sword was Hardshell’s weakness, the consummation of his life’s ambition gone wrong. It was as if he had reared a strong, handsome son and seen him crippled and then laughed at.

Hardshell had bred and reared the colt and named him, as he did all his other colts, from the Bible. As a two-year-old, racing against the best of the baby thoroughbreds of the West, the Sword had shown stamina, gameness, a racing instinct, and a dazzling burst of speed. He was royally sired, and even the millionaire owners agreed that Hardshell had at last produced a great colt. In mid-season he was rated as one of the two best two-year-olds of the year, and offers of large sums were made for him. He was eligible to race in all the big three-year-old stake races the next season, and Hardshell had refused to listen to any offer or set any price. He had set out to develop a champion racer down there on the little farm in the Big Bend of the Tennessee, a champion which would outrun and outgame the best of the country and win the American derby--then the greatest of all turf prizes.

Late in August the thing happened. The colt was at the starting post in a six-furlong dash on the Hawthorne track when the barrier, a band of elastic, was broken by the lunging of another colt. The elastic band struck Sword of Gideon in the eye and maddened him with fright and pain. The accident seemed trivial, but the effect was the destruction of Hardshell’s life dream. Never thereafter would Sword of Gideon face the barrier without a fight. The memory of the stinging agony of that flying elastic was not to be effaced. A dozen times exasperated starters ordered him out of races and sent him back for further schooling at the barrier. Schooling was useless. He refused to face the thing which had hurt him. The only way in which he could be handled at the start of a race was for the jockey to turn his head away from the barrier, wait until the other horses started, then throw him around and send him after the flying field. Occasionally when the jockey swung him at the right second he had a chance to win. The majority of times he was handicapped five or six lengths on every start, and not infrequently when he heard the swish of the barrier he bolted the wrong way of the track. Look in the guide and after his name in many races you will find the brief record of a tragedy in the words, “Left at post.”

The champion was ruined. But in the heart of Hardshell Gaines Sword of Gideon still was the champion. He worked over him as tenderly as a mother over a crippled child, and for him he sang his favorite hymns, as if striving to comfort the horse when he had behaved badly at the post. The newspapers, on account of his bad acting at the start, wrote of him as “Swored at Gideon.”

Big Jim Long had called the Sword a “hound,” and thereafter Hardshell never spoke to him but passed him unseeing. At the bar one day Big Jim had noisily invited everyone to drink with him, and Hardshell had thrown away his beer and spat before walking away--and the open insult stung even Big Jim Long.

All this was three years prior to the day when the affairs of the Long Investment Company reached their climax. In his New York offices, Kirtin realized that the finish was at hand. The bags filled with money had been removed from the safe in the luxurious offices of the Long Investment Company, carried through the door connecting them with the little office of Thos. J. Kirtin, Investments, and the door locked on both sides. Then Kirtin did the one decent thing of his career. He sent a code telegram to Long and to every agent of the company over the ganglia of leased wires, warning them that the jig was up and it was time to disappear.

Probably it was not until he read that message that Big Jim Long understood the full significance of the situation. He never had stopped to ask himself why Kirtin had bestowed rank and titles upon him, why he had elected him president, and why all the ornate stationery and the many messages bore his name, or even why he had been paid five thousand dollars a week. Perhaps he thought he earned it by virtue of his influence among racing people. He understood now that he, Jim Long, would be held accountable to the law, that he would be fugitive or prisoner while Kirtin, with the millions of dollars looted from the public, could not be connected with the swindle and would be safe in Europe.

He cursed Kirtin, and, strangely, not because Kirtin was a thief and worse. He cursed him because he considered Kirtin a fool. Had Kirtin followed his plan and advice, the scheme would have worked. With that almost unlimited capital behind him he could have fixed enough races and won enough money to pay the dividends.

Long knew that within a day or two, three at the longest, the authorities would descend upon the company offices. With a sudden determination, Long sent a code order to every agent of the company to ignore Kirtin’s message and prepare for a killing.

Let Kirtin go his cowardly way. He, Big Jim Long, would face the situation, pay the dividends, and handle the big money himself. He knew that at least a half million dollars remained in the hands of the agents of the company in different cities--the gleanings which Kirtin had not considered worth the risk to remain and collect. Long telegraphed, ordering the agents to hold all funds subject to his order instead of forwarding them to New York.

Kirtin, busy clearing the desk in his office and destroying the last papers that would reveal any connection between Kirtin, Investments, and the Long Investment Company, heard the news and shrugged his shoulders. He had tried to save the fools, and if they refused to be saved it was none of his affair. An hour later he and his suitcases were in the stateroom of a liner.

At the Fair Grounds track in St. Louis, Big Jim Long set to work hastily to stave off disaster and revive the investment company. He had considered telegraphing the authorities to hold Kirtin, but had rejected the plan as unbecoming one in his profession. Long’s plan of procedure was simple and direct. He would fix a race, pay the horse owners well, and win enough money to declare another dividend, restoring the faith of the investors, who already had begun to show signs of uneasiness as rumors spread. It was not a problem of morals but of mathematics.

The chief obstacle to his plan was lack of time, and he knew he must act rapidly. Already the rumors that the Long Investment Company was in trouble had spread through the uneasy ranks of the gamblers, and Long knew the first one who informed a district attorney of the affairs of the company would bring the avalanche. By rapid work he completed his preliminary plans during the races that afternoon. An overnight handicap was carded for the next day’s races, and Long selected eight owners whose morals he knew were below the par even of racing and each agreed to enter a horse in the race. The chief problem was to prevent other owners from naming their horses to start, and to avoid this one owner agreed to enter Attorney Jackson, a high-class racer, to frighten owners of slower horses out.

That evening a caucus was held. Besides Long, eight owners were present. It was agreed that with Attorney Jackson the favorite, the odds against Mildred Rogers would be at least fifteen to one, therefore by simple arithmetic Mildred Rogers should win, because fifteen times one is fifteen, whereas two times one is two. Long intended to bet the remnants of the capital of the investment company, and, figuring the price would recede from fifteen or twenty to one to ten to one before the money was placed, he estimated that he would win close to five million dollars. Not a cent was to be wagered at the track.

The caucus, after nominating Mildred Rogers to win, decided that Attorney Jackson was to make the early running, cutting out a terrific pace to the head of the stretch, while Betty M. and Pretty Dehon were to come up fast, crowd the leader far outside on the turn, allowing Mildred Rogers to come through along the rail, after which the entire field was to bunch behind her and shoo her home a winner, while Attorney Jackson pulled up as if lame.

The rehearsal was progressing satisfactorily and each owner was receiving instructions as to the way his horse should run. The caucus was pleased. Long had agreed that he would bet at least four hundred thousand dollars, and that he would give twenty-five per cent of the total winnings to the owners. The eight who were playing deuces wild in the sport of kings were calculating that they would divide at least a million dollars among themselves when the disquieting news arrived.

“What the hell do you think of that?” Sorgan, owner of Patsy Frewen, demanded. “Old Hardshell Gaines has entered old Swored at Gideon.”

There were a chorus of curses.

“That hound of his ain’t got a chanst,” declared Kinsley. “It’s ten to one he runs the wrong way of the track.”

“He’s the worst actor at the post on the circuit,” said Stanley.

“He’s liable to bust up the start.”

“Better pick one of our horses to bump him and put him over a fence,” snarled McGuire. “He ain’t got any business in this. He knows Attorney Jackson can beat him.”