pace, like you. . . .
What's the matter with you? He's crowding you--look out, there! Jam him!
. . . He's pushing you hard. . . . Neck and neck, you fool. That black
fiend can't be stopped. . . . Use the whip! Red, use the whip! It's all
you've left. Slug her, slug her! That's it, that's it! Slug speed into
her. Only a furlong to go. . . . Come on, Red, come on! . . .

Here they come, in a smother of dust. Neck and neck down the stretch.
The red and white of the Morgan stable; the blue and gold of the Desha.
It's Swallow. No, no, it's The Rogue. Back and forth, back and forth
stormed the rival names. The field was pandemonium. "Cottonton" was
a mass of frantic arms, raucous voices, white faces. Drake, his pudgy
hands whanging about like semaphore-signals in distress, was blowing
his lungs out: "Come on, kid come on! You've got him now! He can't last!
Come on, come on!--for my sake, for your sake, for anybody's sake, but
only come!"

Game Swallow's eyes had a blue film over them. The heart-breaking
pace-following had told. Red's error of judgment had told. The "little
less" had told. A frenzied howl went up. "Garrison! Garrison! Garrison!"
The name that had once meant so much now meant--everything. For in a
swirl of dust and general undiluted Hades, the horses had stormed past
the judges' stand. The great Carter was lost and won.

Swallow, with a thin streamer of blood threading its way from her
nostrils, was a beaten horse; a game, plucky, beaten favorite. It was
all over. Already The Rogue's number had been posted. It was all over;
all over. The finish of a heart-breaking fight; the establishing of a
new record for the Aqueduct. And a name had been replaced in its former
high niche. The has-been had come back.

And "Cottonton," led by a white-faced girl and a big, apoplectic
turfman, were forgetting dignity, decorum, and conventionality as hand
in hand they stormed through the surging eruption of humanity fighting
to get a chance at little Billy Garrison's hand.

And as, saddle on shoulder, he stood on the weighing-scales and caught
sight of the oncoming hosts of "Cottonton" and read what the girl's
eyes held, then, indeed, he knew all that his finish had earned him--the
beginning of a new life with a new name; the beginning of one that the
lesson he had learned, backed by the great love that had come to him,
would make--paradise. And his one unuttered prayer was: "Dear God, make
me worthy, make me worthy of them-