except in a selling race,"
retorted his master.

"I've got to think of myself," growled Langdon. "If he'd been beat off,
there'd been trouble; the Stewards have got the other race in their crop
a bit yet."

"I'm not blaming you, Langdon, only I was just a trifle afraid that you
were going to beat Porter's mare. He's a friend of mine, and needed a
win badly. I'm not exactly his father confessor, but I'm his banker,
which amounts to pretty much the same thing."

"What about the horse, sir," asked the Trainer.

"We'll see later on. Let him go easy for the present."

"I wonder what he meant by that," Langdon mused to himself, as Crane
moved away. "He don't make nobody a present of a race for love."
Suddenly he stumbled upon a solution of the enigma. "Well, I'm damned
if that wasn't slick; he give me the straight tip to leave Porter to
him--to let him do the plannin'; I see."

VII

Porter was an easy man with his horses. Though he could not afford,
because of his needs, to work out his theory that two-year-olds should
not be raced, yet he utilized it as far as possible by running them at
longer intervals than was general.

"I'll start the little mare about once more this season," he told Dixon.
"The babes can't cut teeth, and grow, and fight it out in punishing
races on dusty hay and hard-shelled oats, when they ought to be picking
grass in an open field. She's too good a beast to do up in her young
days. The Assassins made good three-year-olds, and the little mare's
dam, Maid of Rome, wasn't much her first year out--only won once--but as
a three-year-old she won three out of four starts, and the fourth year
never lost a race. Lucretia ought to be a great mare next year if I lay
her by early this season. She's in a couple of stakes at Gravesend and
Sheepshead, and we'll just fit her into the softest spot."

"What about Lauzanne?" asked the Trainer, "I'm afraid he's a bad horse."

"How is he doing?"

"He's stale. He's a bad doer--doesn't clean up his oats, an' mopes."

"I guess that killing finish with The Dutchman took the life out of him.
That sort of thing often settles a soft-hearted horse for all time."

"I don't think it was the race, sir," Dixon replied; "they just pumped
the cocaine into him till he was fair blind drunk; he must a' swallowed
the bottle. I give him a ball, a bran mash, and Lord knows what all, an'
the poison's workin' out of him. He's all breakin' out in lumps; you'd
think he'd