"’What do I get on my horse?’ he asked the first bookie he struck.
"The layer grinned, for he knew there were eight or ten good ones in the race, three or four of them quoted around even money.
"’I’ve got 75 to 1 hung up about him, and all you want of it,’ said the bookie. ’You can write your own ticket, in fact.’
"’Why, sure,’ replied the bookmaker. And he took $5 of the ’owner’s’ money at 100 to 1. Just out of curiosity I followed the seedy man in his tour of the books and I saw him put down $70 in $5 bets on his horse to win at 100 to 1. It struck me then that there was to be something done on the seedy man’s horse. But I wasn’t capping the bookies’ game, and I’ve got a fad for minding my own business, anyhow, and so I kept off the race and went into the stand to watch it. I had a hunch to play the seedy man’s horse for a good wad, but I reflected that if I got on and the good thing went through the bookies ’ud be suspicious about such a well-known player as I was being in on it, and in the investigation the seedy man might be cut out, and I didn’t want to knock him. But I surely was a whole lot interested in the way that race was to come out.
"I took a good look at the seedy man’s horse as they filed past the stand to the post. He looked much better and pretty nippy at that for such a rancid outsider. The same boy that had ridden the horse in his first race at Alexander Island and landed him nowhere was up. It was a mile race.
"The favorite, a horse called Walcott—4 to 5 on in the betting—got off on the right foot with a jump and started to tiptoe the field. At the quarter he led by three lengths, with the second choice, a good outlaw named Halcyon, beginning to set sail for him. The rest of the field of thirteen were all strung out, the seedy man’s horse ’way in the ruck. But I kept my glasses on that horse all the way, and I could see that at the half he was under the devil’s own pull. The boy had half a dozen wraps on him and I felt then, even if the favorite was still a good four lengths in the lead, and going easily, that there was but one horse in the race, and that horse the seedy man’s. It was a watermelon just opening, but I suppose I was the only man at the track that happened to have got next to the game. The judges didn’t observe, of course, that the seedy owner’s horse was under twenty wraps, for they looked upon him as a dead one and paid no attention to his running.