Now, I had at first no intention of pulling a dollar out of the affair, except my regular fee for training. Even this I at first declined, wishing to help my friend purely out of friendship. Mac would not have it, however, and as his pay was high, I allowed him to have his way.
I had now been making a business of training athletes for nearly a year, getting a good living out of it, and had at the beginning a nice little nest-egg in the bank, ready for a rainy day.
Exactly how this was accumulated I do not care to say. These tales are in no sense confessions, and I shall avoid the "strutting I" as much as possible.
After my defeat of "Chipper" Simmons, at Hacking's Brighton track, there were a couple of years passed not at all to my liking, though profitably enough for one of small ideas. I took on matches wherever they promised a dollar. I ran everybody, and every distance, from a fifty-yard dash to a mile run, and almost invariably won, largely because of the pains I took with myself, and my careful training. I learned all the tricks of the trade, gave close finishes always, did an artistic "fainting act," and made myself a subject of regretful, not to say painful, remembrance to a large part of the sporting fraternity.
They stood it all right for a couple of years, but the summer before I met MacLeod I suddenly discovered I had about squeezed the orange dry. They had, very naturally, grown more and more shy of me, until it had become impossible to obtain a match, except under prohibitive conditions. I tried giving good men eight yards in the "hundred" and one hundred yards in the mile for a while, but discovered it was a hard business, with nothing in it. My only profit, as far as I could see, was to run crooked, and fake a race or two, but at this, though not over-nice, I drew the line.
I was willing to underrate my powers, and fool the fancy on my condition; to win by a scant yard with pretended effort, in order to pull on my opponent to another race; but to back him on the sly and lie down, to pull money from my friends, I could not. A gentleman I might not be, but honest I would be still. Indeed, despite the "winning way" I had, my reputation was of the best as a rare, good runner, as a square man who gave his backers a straight run for their money, and as the most knowing man in the States concerning work and training for the cinder-path.