Part 2

It was a testimonial to his reputation for honesty that not one of the assembled crooks even suggested asking Gaines to enter the conspiracy. They cursed him for an interfering old fool, they cursed his stubbornness, they cursed his idiocy in still insisting that Sword of Gideon was a stake horse, they cursed his supposed parsimony and believed he had entered his aged racer in the hope of winning a few dollars by getting the place or show money. Not one suspected that anything excepting blind chance had caused him to enter his horse in the race.

They were wrong. Hardshell Gaines, with an unsullied record of fifty years on the turf, had heard something. He had seen Long in conference with some owners, and when the same owners rushed to enter their horses in the overnight handicap Gaines’ suspicion had become certainty. He had entered Sword of Gideon in the handicap, and for an hour afterward had rubbed and stroked the old campaigner, and as he rolled bandages around the bad leg of the old horse and applied liniment to his throat, he had hummed a hymn.

Occasionally his voice rose in song and he sang of the time when “the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” It was after dark when he entered the Laclede downtown and sought out the assistant starter.

“Joe,” he said solemnly, “I have been in this game, man an’ boy, clost to fifty year and tried to run straight and do right as a hossman and a Baptist. No man can say James Buchanan Gaines owes him a cent or ever done a dishonest thing. I’ve done had a wrastle with my conscience, and consarn me if I believe it’s wrong to skin a skunk!”

Joe nodded approval.

“There’s something doing, Joe,” said Hardshell. “Eight of them owners and that slick crook Jim Long is holdin’ a caucus. Nary a word to old Hardshell, and the Sword is entered.”

Joe nodded understandingly.

“Lissen, Joe,” said Hardshell, lowering his voice. “Long is planning a big killing, and it’s up to me and the Sword and you to stop him. The Sword is good for once, if that nigh left leg don’t overheat. He can beat any hoss in that race, ’ceptin’ Attorney Jackson, and I reckon they ain’t plannin’ to have no favorite win.”

Joe nodded again and reserved speech, waiting for the proposition.

“I ain’t asking no man to do anything dishonest, Joe,” the old man went on--“it’s agin my religion and my conscience too--but something’s _got_ to be done.”

Hardshell waited expectantly and hummed “When temptation sore assails me,” hoping that Joe would indicate his attitude or show receptivity, but the assistant starter nodded and smoked in silence.

“’Tain’t as if I was trying to bribe anyone,” Hardshell explained painfully. “I don’t want no one to do anything that is agin his conscience.”

“What do you want me to do?” Joe asked, breaking his silence.

“All I ask is that you help the Sword get off straight, and me and you and the Sword’ll spile the crookedest plan ever hatched.”

“Ain’t any law against my helping a bad actor get off right,” said Joe.

Hardshell said no more. He gripped Joe’s hand hard, and, after buying him a cigar, strolled away, humming “Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Love, with all thy quickening powers.”

There was an air of uneasiness hanging over the betting ring at the Fair Grounds track as the horses hand-galloped to the starting post in the fourth race. The air was surcharged with expectancy. Judges, always alert and watching for signs of dishonesty, stared at the horses and received frequent bulletins from the betting ring. Bookmakers, fearful of a sudden attack by betting commissioners backing a certain horse, held their chalk and erasers ready for rapid use. Bettors, hearing vague whispers of “something doing,” asked each other excitedly what was being played. Yet everything in the betting ring, paddock, and stand seemed tranquil. The betting was light. Attorney Jackson was favorite at seven to five, Patsy Frewen the second choice, at two to one, the others at odds of from four to twenty, with Mildred Rogers ranging from fifteen to twenty to one and only a few scattered bets registered on her. Yet from a score of cities all over America came frantic telegrams to gamblers, bookies, and owners, asking for track odds and inquiring the meaning of the terrific plunging on Mildred Rogers. Big Jim Long, using the efficient organization of the company, was betting the remaining funds of the concern. More than fifty thousand was bet in Chicago, thirty thousand in Louisville, twenty thousand in Cincinnati, then twelve thousand or more in other cities in which the Long Investment Company had offices.

There was a last minute plunge on Mildred Rogers at St. Louis by gamblers who had heard the news from outside, and the odds dropped quickly from fifteen to four to one.

As he tightened the girth for the last time, Hardshell Gaines whispered to Pete, his jockey:

“Take a toe holt and a tooth holt, Pete. Joe’ll git you off a-runnin’, and I got a pill in him that’d blow up a bank. It’s timed to go off about the half-mile if you ain’t too long at the post. All you got to do is sit still and hold on.”

Humming, he went to the book of his friend and wagered two dollars that Sword of Gideon would win. He was still humming when he went down to the rail to watch the horses start, and the hymn he hummed was, “Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise.”

Out by the barrier a perspiring starter was beseeching, swearing, threatening, and scolding, while a row of horses milled and maneuvered for position. In the midst of the mêlée of milling horses, Joe, the assistant starter, a buggy whip in one hand, sweated and swore as he appeared to be striving to make Sword of Gideon line up with the other horses. Out of the corner of his eye Joe watched the starter for the telltale movement which revealed the second that the starter would spring the barrier.

When that movement came Joe held the bridle bit of Sword of Gideon, and before the barrier flashed he threw the horse’s head around, leaped aside, and slashed him sharply across the quarters with the whip.

Sword of Gideon, stung into forgetfulness of fear, leaped forward. The barrier flashed past his nose and he leaped into full stride, two full lengths in the lead of the field before the others were under way.

Big Jim Long, his florid face mottled, hurled his chewed cigar against the ground and swore viciously. Sword of Gideon, running like a wild horse, opened up a gap of eight lengths between himself and the nearest pursuer in the first eighth of a mile. In vain Attorney Jackson’s jockey, remembering his instructions, spurred and urged his mount, striving to catch the flying leader and set the pace. At the half Attorney Jackson dropped back, beaten and out of it. Mildred Rogers’ rider, seeing the conspiracy going wrong, made a desperate effort to overtake the flying Sword. The nitroglycerine pellet had acted and the aged horse was running as he had run when he seemed destined to be champion. Length by length he increased his lead over the staggering, wabbling field, and tore down the stretch fifteen lengths ahead of Patsy Frewen.

Big Jim Long, his heavy jaws sagging, his face mottled red and white, his big, soft hands clenched, watched until the horses were within a few yards of the finish. Then he turned and walked rapidly across through the edge of the betting ring toward the exit. At the back of the betting ring he met Hardshell Gaines moving toward the paddock to greet the victorious Sword of Gideon. Big Jim’s pent up wrath exploded.

“You--and your blank blanked spavined hound!” he raged. “You blanked old fool, if it hadn’t been for you--”

Hardshell Gaines looked straight ahead, unseeing, unhearing, and as he walked past the furious gambler he hummed contentedly; and even Big Jim recognized the long metre doxology.

“JAUNDICE’S” LAST RACE

“JAUNDICE’S” LAST RACE

There remains some of the Christ-spirit in the worst of us, perhaps, but the most optimistic of missionaries would hardly have assayed the soul of “Jaundice” O’Keefe with the hope of discovering even a trace of that quality. Jaundice was a product, or by-product, of the race-track. He had run away from his home in St. Louis at the age of eleven, to escape the beatings administered by a drinking father and a sodden mother, and had found refuge in a freight car loaded with horses which were being shipped to a race-meeting in New Orleans. Two hostlers were drinking from a bottle when not sleeping on a pile of hay. They welcomed the boy, gave him a drink, fed him, and allowed him to burrow into the hay for warmth. Perhaps it was kindness, perhaps they saw in him a means of escaping the work of feeding and watering horses during the long journey.

Jaundice was happy. He loved horses. Perhaps that was the remaining trace of good after the rest had been bred or beaten out of him. He had loved the horses which drew the coal wagon his father drove when sober, and the sight of the trim thoroughbreds filled him with awed admiration. Arrived in New Orleans, he followed the horses to the race-track, found refuge in the stables, and was adopted into the army of those who follow the races. A year later he had acquired a master’s degree in profanity and obscenity and developed a ratlike viciousness in fighting when cornered. He was undersized and undernourished, with the remnants of a fighting spirit from generations of Irish sustaining him. Stable-boys learned to fear the savageness of his methods and left him alone. Occasionally a trainer or stable boss beat him with a whip and cursed him.

Instinctively horses loved him. In one year he was an exercise boy. At fourteen, with all the wickedness and viciousness of the race-track and stable concentrated in him, he could ride and was awarded a jockey’s license and a suit of gay-colored silks.

He rode winners. Winning, with Jaundice, was unselfish. He rode not for personal glory or for money, but for the honor of the horse on which he was mounted. When he was beaten he gulped dry sobs and went away with his mount to console it.

For four years he rode races on the flat, at tracks all over America. During these four years he made as much money as the average man makes in a lifetime, and at the end of it had nothing. To him money meant only expensive meals, clothes remarkable for colors and patterns, wine, women of a sort, and large yellow diamonds. At eighteen he was an old man. His face was yellow and drawn; he had ceased to be “Kid” O’Keefe and become “Jaundice.” He was gaining weight and beginning to pay the penalty of the carouses which followed each temporary period of prosperity. For a year he fought to hold his standing. His mounts became fewer and fewer. When the owners ceased to employ him to ride on the flat, he became a steeplechase jockey.

Riding steeplechasers in races means in the majority of cases moral and physical suicide. Jaundice had no fear of physical consequence, nor any conception of morality. With two drinks of whisky poured into his outraged body, he would have tried to make his mount jump the Grand Cañon, had the course led in that direction. Falls and broken bones failed to break his nerve, but his subconscious honesty was shattered. On the flat he never had ridden a crooked race. He was restrained by no consciousness of right or wrong. He tried always to win because he loved the horses he rode. Over the jumps he had no such scruples. The steeplechase horses were “has-beens” like himself and entitled to no consideration. He commenced to ride queer-looking races. He was nineteen when he fell off the favorite in a steeplechase race to permit an outsider to win and the stewards ruled him off the tracks for one year.

What Jaundice did in that year of banishment he alone knew in detail. Barred from the only home and the only associates he had ever known, the great loneliness came upon him. He was broke. He stole and was sent to prison. When the suspension was lifted he went back to the tracks. He had grown heavier and his eyes and his mind were blurred by drink. He lived with the horses, attaching himself to the stable for which he had been a star jockey, and lived in the stalls and the cars. His love of the animals themselves had waned. Drudgery and vicious living had warped even that instinct. When he dared he became a tout, whispering information to petty gamblers at the edge of the betting ring. When he left the tracks at night it was to betray stable information to bartenders in return for drinks.

When he was twenty-two there remained two loves by which it was proved that all good can not be smelted out of a human being. One was for Doc Grausman, the gallant bay stake horse of the stable, whose dam he had ridden to victory many times. The other was for Lord James.

On race-tracks there is something in a name. Jaundice received his because his complexion had become a dirty yellow. Lord James was so called because the one spark of decency remaining in him caused him to conceal his family name. It was reputed that he was the son of an English nobleman and that he could have a title and estate if he returned to England. Rags of an old pride and remnants of decent breeding restrained Lord James from mentioning the family name as his own or from returning home to disgrace them. He had come to America, a younger son, with a stable of race-horses and high hopes. Robbed, fleeced, he had “quit.” Jaundice can not be spoken of as having degenerated. His original height permitted but a slight fall. But Lord James had sunk to even lower levels. He was a cadger, a tout, and a sneak-thief at such times when no risk was involved.

No one around the tracks hated either Lord James or Jaundice. They pitied Jaundice, but the touts themselves despised Lord James. He had lost all his courage, if he ever possessed any, and drink had sapped his health and his brain. Of the trio, only Doc Grausman bore his name honestly. His names were those of his sire and his granddam, and he was of royal blood and three years old.

When Lord James and Jaundice had become friends no one knew. Probably it was during Jaundice’s career as a winning jockey, while he scattered money recklessly after every winning race. Upon such boys Lord James had preyed for years. These two had nothing in common. Race, religion, birth, breeding, and education made them different, but they met in the thick scum of vice and became inseparable. For Lord James, Jaundice stole and betrayed stable secrets, pulled race-horses, bought drinks, and furnished food and lodging. It is not recorded that Lord James ever did anything for Jaundice.

These two sank lower and lower together. When the majority of the race-tracks of the country were closed, they disappeared from the world of sport, starved, and served prison terms together. When racing reopened, they reappeared. Jaundice had developed a cough. His wasted body revealed the ravages of tuberculosis. Lord James was wearing, with a pitiful effort to maintain an air of decency, a suit purchased with his last remittance money two years before.

The horses were racing at Jamaica and the weather was raw and rainy. They experienced difficulty in gaining an entry to the track and were compelled to remain outside, shivering and wet, until the day’s sport ended. Then a negro stable-boy allowed them to sleep with him in a stall, and Jaundice procured food from the camp-fires, where no one ever is refused.

Lord James did not get up the next morning. He had crawled into the hay with wet clothing and in the morning he had a fever. Jaundice brought him food, but he did not eat. All day he remained huddled in the hay, covered with horse blankets, his face turned to the board wall. He was thinking and his mind was Gethsemane.

During the night Lord James touched Jaundice with his hand and waked him. Very quietly and with a return of long-forgotten dignity, he entrusted to Jaundice an envelope upon which was written an address in England, charging him to mail it and allow no one to see it. He asked Jaundice to see the boys and ask them to bury him decently. Then he gripped Jaundice’s hand and died gamely, sustained by the traditions of his race and class. Jaundice alone wept. It was the first time in many years he had wept, and he was ashamed of his tears.

Around the race-track no man connected with the game dies and lacks a decent funeral, but there was scant sympathy for Lord James. The hat was passed, bookmakers, jockeys, trainers, owners, grafters, even the pickpockets, contributing, but their contributions were small. The whole amounted to eighty dollars. Jaundice was not satisfied. Had he been satisfied, there would have been no story to tell.

On the day following the horses moved to Belmont Park to open the racing season on that track, and Doc Grausman was entered to start in a high-weight handicap. Doc Grausman belonged to a wealthy man whose colors Jaundice had often carried to victory. This owner had not entered the horse in the handicap with any expectation of winning. The colt needed work, and he wanted to see how well the three-year-old could carry weight racing against all aged horses.

Jaundice had not slept. His clothing still was damp and he was coughing. For the time his abiding love for Doc Grausman was put in the background while he went from man to man begging money to give Lord James what he considered a proper and fitting funeral. The undertaker wanted one hundred and fifty dollars. Jaundice was determined to raise the sum before the afternoon’s sport ended.

Shortly before the bugle sounded, calling the horses from the paddock for the first race, a fractious colt lashed out with his feet and kicked the jockey who had been employed to ride Doc Grausman in the fourth. Jaundice heard of the accident within a few minutes. It was he who hurried to the club-house and informed the owner.

“Thanks, Jaundice,” the owner said carelessly. “I wanted the colt to have the workout. Now, I suppose I’ll have to scratch him. I don’t want to put a strange boy up.”

“Mister Phil,” said Jaundice, inspired with a sudden idea, “let me ride Doc Grausman. I’m down to weight, Mister Phil. I only weigh a hundred and twenty-eight now. Let me ride him, Mister Phil, and I’ll win.”

His voice was pleading, his eyes and manner appealing, and he coughed harder. The owner was surprised and laughed slightly. “I’m afraid it can not be fixed, Jaundice,” he said lightly. “How do you stand with the stewards?”

“I’m clean with them now, Mister Phil. They ain’t got nothin’ on me. They never could prove I pulled Lady Rose. I’m down to weight, Mister Phil, and that Doc Grausman horse likes me.”

His eagerness and the truth of the final statement decided the matter.

“I’ll see the stewards and explain,” said the owner. “He’s only in for the workout, and perhaps they’ll stand for it. Sure you’re strong enough to handle the colt?”

The owner had observed the cough, and Jaundice checked it with an effort.

“Yes, Mister Phil, I’m all right. Just caught a cold. Get this mount for me, Mister Phil. I’ve got to plant Lord James decent.”

“That old bum dead at last?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got to get a hundred and fifty to plant him, and the boys ain’t kicking in fast. Let me ride this Doc Grausman hoss and I’ll plant Lord James swell, like his family would want him.”

The owner passed over a twenty-dollar banknote. What he told the track officials no one knows, but when the fourth race was called, Jaundice, carefully hiding his cough, rode forth for the first time in four years wearing the colors of his old stable.

The bookmakers were laying thirty to one against Doc Grausman, and a wit in the ring said it was ten to one the colt, twenty to one the boy. What was not known was that Jaundice had taken the money that had been contributed to bury Lord James and wagered it three ways, straight, place, and show, on Doc Grausman. A new generation of jockeys faced the start, a generation that knew nothing of the skill of the boy who had ridden champions. The new boys, with the contempt that youth holds for the “has-been,” jeered at Jaundice, and hurled insulting epithets at him as they wheeled and maneuvered for the advantage of the break. Jaundice did not retort with oaths and vilifications as he would have done in other days. He was afraid he would start to cough.

The barrier flashed. Jaundice had been holding Doc Grausman steady during the milling of the others. Out of the corner of the eye he had caught the betraying arm movement of the starter an instant before the barrier flashed upward, had shot Doc Grausman at the starting line just the instant it flickered past his nose, had beaten the start a length and a half while the others were taking the first jump and sent him roaring down the long straight-away for four and a half furlongs. Riding him out desperately at the end, he held the lead by half a length over the favorite.

As the horses paraded back past the stands, he held his lips tightly pressed together. He staggered a little as he weighed out, and in the paddock his lips were reddened. The strain of the ride had opened the old wounds in his lungs.

An hour later he ordered the undertaker to give Lord James the best funeral he could for one thousand two hundred dollars and paid over the money. There remained for his share of the victory just twenty-seven dollars.

The news spread around the track that evening that Jaundice was to give Lord James a “swell funeral.” Curiosity was aroused. Touts, stable-boys, bookmakers’ helpers, a few jockeys, attended. It happened that Jaundice came to me to consult as to the minister, and I had secured the services of a wonderful little rector who is much interested in all human beings.

The funeral was the strangest one I ever attended. The little minister was doing his best to comfort the mourners, but plainly was at a disadvantage because Jaundice was the only mourner. Jaundice, through some instinctive sense of respect for the dead, was standing very awkwardly and tears were rolling down his cheeks. He was weeping for the second time in his life. Finally the little rector read from the service: “He is not dead, but sleeping.”

Jaundice started, then stared, reached instinctively for his pocket, and sobbed in a whisper: “Ten dollars will win you twenty-seven if you think old Lord James is only sleeping.”