"He got the thousand two hours before the race was run. The poor owner looked Juliet over, and called his boy into a dark corner of the stable.
"’Take her out in front, son,’ he said, ’and tow-rope them. Don’t let ’em get within a block of you. I’ll send your mother a couple o’ hundred after you fetch her home.’
"’She’d win with a dummy on her,’ says the kid.
"Then the poor-but-honest-not owner takes the thousand he already has in his kick, and the thousand the beefing plunger has given him, and spraddles it all over the United States on Juliet at from 5 to 7 to 1.
"Juliet wins by fourteen lengths, and the plunger, with his mouth twitching, hunts up the owner of Juliet. All he gets is a line of chile con carne conversation, and, finally, a puck in the eye.
"’Do others or they’ll do you’ isn’t the way they used to teach it when I went to Sunday-school," concluded the old-time trainer, "but there are occasions when the rule just has to be twisted that way."
_A Bottled-up Cinch That Came Off at One of the Chicago Tracks._
"The first bet that I ever put down on a horse race," said a horse owner and trainer at an uptown café the other night, "was on a horse that stood at 100 to 1 in the betting. It was also the first race I ever saw run by thoroughbreds. I was clerking in a Long Island City grocery store for $8 a week at the time, and I didn’t know a race-horse from a ton of coal. I got a couple of my fingers crushed between two salt fish boxes one morning, and I had to lay off from work. I didn’t want to hang around my room, and didn’t know what to do with myself, and so when a no-account young fellow I knew suggested that I go over with him to Monmouth Park and have a look at the races, I fell in with the proposition. Besides the remains of my previous week’s pay, about $3, I had $20 saved up out of my wages, and I kept this in one $20 note in my inside vest pocket. After paying for round-trip tickets for my friend and myself, and for two tickets of admission to the race grounds, I was practically broke with the exception of a few cents, for I didn’t count the $20 as available assets. I intended to hang on to that unbroken. Well, I found that all my sporty friend wanted of me was to have me pay his way on the train and into the grounds, for he promptly lost me as soon as we got by the gate. I felt pretty sore at this treatment, not that I wanted his help, for I hadn’t the least idea of doing any betting with my savings, but I didn’t cotton to the notion of being played for a good thing and then thrown that way.