"’You are wise people,’ he thought, ’but this is where I get the big end of it.’
"Within three minutes after he had started his slate he had taken in the horse owner’s $1,000 worth of his horse at 2 to 1. The handicappers just battled to get at his book at their figures. Said he to himself, ’I’ll just tap myself on this watermelon,’ and by the time the horses went to the post he had taken in $5,000 of the public money at 2 to 1 on that horse that was going to lose, and he knew that he’d be just $5,000 to the good.
"Of course you chaps are next. When the horses got away the skate that the ex-grocer had laid his whole $1,000 against walked in on the bit, fifteen lengths to the good in a buck-jump. He was under twenty wraps all the way from the flag-fall.
"The new bookie paid out his $10,000, bought a clay pipe and an eight-cent package of punk tobacco, and went out of business, and he’s been out of business ever since. It took him about a week to get contiguous to the fact that the men who collected his $10,000 were the smooth owner’s commissioners, but when he went gunning the owner had removed his string from Gloucester, and was taking a little winter cruise in a felucca in the Ægean Sea. But if Gloucester ever starts up again, and there’s a conflagration, I’ll know how it started."
"There’s another chap that I know of who’s been smoking unfragrant tobacco in a pipe for a good many years on account of an outlaw track deal," said one of the other turfmen at the table, "but he wasn’t a new man at the game. He was an old-timer—so much of an old-timer that it was up to him to know that, once having made a tool of a man or a boy in the racing business, it is never the part of wisdom to throw him overboard on the presumption that he’s a dead one. Turf followers, as you fellows all know, have a habit of resurrecting themselves at inopportune moments when it seems that they are so deeply buried that they’ll never struggle to the top of the ground again, and when they do run a shoe-tongue into a tan-yard they are more than liable to get hunk with former pals who have cast them aside in the hour of adversity. Now, it is a particularly dangerous thing for any man connected with racing to do business with a jockey. I never heard of a bit of jockey-tampering that didn’t get out sooner or later, to the disadvantage of the man that did the corrupting. I guess we all know of cases in which jockeys, after being ruled off for crooked work, have become exacting pensioners on the hands of the men responsible for their downfall for long stretches of years. The story I have in mind is of a jockey who, while he wasn’t set down through following the directions of the bookmaker he did business with, was treated with characteristic meanness by the latter when he was up against it owing to an accident; and the way this jock got even with his former tamperer was unique.