_He Was Thought to Be a No-Account Cripple, but He Proved Himself to Be "All Horse" When Called Upon._
"A friend of mine who came here from Chicago for the Bennings meeting was telling me about that Jim McCleevy mule," said an old-time owner of thoroughbreds who is wintering a string of jumpers and breaking a bunch of yearlings out at the Bennings track. "That makes a queer story, and there are some strange things connected with the thoroughbred game, at that. This McCleevy horse wasn’t worth a bag of moist peanuts at the beginning of the present racing season. He couldn’t beat a fat man. He had never been in the money. He was a legitimate thousand-to-one shot in any company. He was the candidate for the shafts of a brick cart, when by some odd chance he passed into the possession of a nice young woman who was going to school somewhere in the State of Iowa. The girl’s uncle was mixed up some way or another with the turf, and he bought the McCleevy plug for a joke, paying a few dollars for him. In a spirit of fun he wrote to his niece that he had bought Jim McCleevy in her name, and that the horse belonged to her and would be run in her interest. The young woman didn’t know the difference between a race-horse and a chatelaine bag. She was an orphan, and struggling to get an education for herself. Her ambition was to take a course at a woman’s college, but, up to the time of this incident, which lasted throughout the spring and summer, her hope of putting this ambition over the plate was pretty shadowy, and it looked like it was up to her to get a job teaching a country school in order to support herself. But she wrote to her uncle that she accepted the gift of the no-account racer with gratitude, and inquired if the horse could not trot right fast, for, if so, she might be able to dispose of him to some well-to-do farmer in her neighborhood.
"Jim McCleevy was attached to the string of a good trainer, who saw at once that the horse had been underestimated, that he had been badly handled, and that it would be worth the effort to try to make something of him. He spent two or three weeks monkeying with the skate and fixing him up, and then he sent him out one morning with a lummux of a stable boy on his back and put the watch on him. Jim McCleevy breezed a mile in 1:44, fighting for his head at the finish, and two days later he was slapped into a selling race at a mile and a sixteenth, with light weight, a bum apprentice lad up, and all kinds of a price, for there were some good ones in the race, which was at the Harlem track, in Chicago. The girl’s uncle scattered a few dollars around the ring on the mutt, all three ways, and McCleevy came home on the bit. That was the beginning of McCleevy. He was put into a couple of races a week at a mile and more, at the Harlem and Hawthorne tracks, during the entire racing season at Chicago, and he won race after race, no matter how they piled the weight penalties up on him. When he didn’t win he broke into the money, and as there was always a good price on him, seeing that almost every time he raced he was pitted against horses that seemed to outclass him, the uncle of the girl who owned him got some of the money every time. He parleyed the money that he won for his niece on Jim McCleevy’s first race, and he got it back and a bunch besides every time. The fame of Jim McCleevy spread around Chicago, and a Chicago newspaper man went down to Iowa to interview the young woman who owned the horse. She told him, artlessly, that while she abhorred gambling—well, she certainly did enjoy the prospect of being enabled to complete her education. Her uncle deposited between $8000 and $9000 in her name, the amount he had won for her in purses and bets on Jim McCleevy, at the wind-up of the racing season, and the horse, which developed quite a bit of real class, still belongs to her.