The years between the time he left home and the period when he won his first mount on the track, his natural birthright, Billy Garrison often told himself he would never care to look back upon. He was young, and he did not know that years of privation, of hardship, of semi-starvation--but with an insistent ambition goading one on--are not years to eliminate in retrospect. They are years to reverence.
He did not know that prosperity, not adversity, is the supreme test. And when the supreme test came; when the goal was attained, and the golden sun of wealth, fame, and honor beamed down upon him, little Billy Garrison was found wanting. He was swamped by the flood. He went the way of many a better, older, wiser man--the easy, rose-strewn way, big and broad and scented, that ends in a bottomless abyss filled with bitter tears and nauseating regrets; the abyss called, “It might have been.”
Where he had formerly shunned vice by reason of adversity and poverty making it appear so naked, revolting, unclean, foreign to his state, prosperity had now decked it out in her most sensuous, alluring garments. Red's moral diatribe had been correct. Garrison had followed the band-wagon to the finish, never asking where it might lead; never caring. He had youth, reputation, money--he could never overdraw that account. And so the modern pied piper played, and little Garrison blindly danced to the music with the other fools; danced on and on until he was swallowed up in the mountain.
Then he awoke too late, as they all awake; awoke to find that his vigor had been sapped by early suppers and late breakfasts; his finances depleted by slow horses and fast women; his nerve frayed to ribbons by gambling. And then had come that awful morning when he first commenced to cough. Would he, could he, ever forget it?
Billy Garrison huddled down now in the roaring train as he thought of it. It was always before him, a demoniacal obsession--that morning when he coughed, and a bright speck of arterial blood stood out like a tardy danger-signal against the white of his handkerchief; it was leering at him, saying: “I have been here always, but you have chosen to be blind.”
Consumption--the jockey's Old Man of the Sea--had arrived at last. He had inherited the seeds from his father; he had assiduously cultivated them by making weight against all laws of nature; by living against laws of God and man. Now they had been punished as they always are. Nature had struck, struck hard.