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Faust went away more than ever suspicious of Crane and Diablo. That fifty dollars being put on for anybody else was bunkum. What was Crane up to anyway? If he really meant to back the horse he would not have started with such a trifle. Perhaps Diablo had been stuck in the Brooklyn simply to see how the handicapper would rate him.
But one cannot thus limit the rights of property, and as long as the owner does not purposely lose a race, and does not deceive the handicapper as to the real value of his horse for the purpose of getting a reduction of weights, he can surely do as he pleases with his own. There will remain, of course, the question of morality and of delicacy, of which each one must be the judge for himself.
When the gentleman who paid income-tax on nine thousand a year brought the action which secured him the contemptuous verdict, the official handicapper to the Jockey Club declared on oath that the jockey's character was "as bad as bad can be." The starter and a score of other witnesses followed in the same groove, and yet this man was freely employed. Why?
William had been heavily hit last week through overlaying his book against a horse he didn't believe in, and the whole bar joined in the laugh against him. "I don't say nothing about bookmaking," said Journeyman; "but there's a great many women nowadays who is mighty sharp at spotting a 'orse that the handicapper had let in pretty easy."
"Do you have to pull horses, then, to get employment?" "Oh, well, it's this way," he said, rather apologetically, "if an owner is badly treated by the handicapper, and is just giving his horse a run to get weight off, then it's right enough to catch hold a bit. But when a horse is favourite and the public are backing him it isn't right to take hold of him then. I would not do it."
On the other hand, the handicapper cannot bring the chances of the really bad horses up to the mean average, no matter how much he may favor them in the weights, and thus it nearly always turns out that the Omnium, like every other important handicap, is won by a horse of the second class, generally a three-year-old, whose real merits have been hidden from the handicapper.
He is a regular attendant at the Corner, where he compiles a limited but comfortable libretto. During season he rides often in the Park, mounted on a clever well-bred pony. He is to be seen escorting celebrated horsewoman, Fanny Highflyer, or in confidential converse with Lord Thimblerig, the eminent handicapper.
He has a roll that would choke a hippopotamus and appears willing to bet them as high as a hound's back. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Bobby Wilson, the handicapper, says Don Quixote smokes marihuana, but the jefe politico says he knows it's the fermented juice of the century plant. However, Bobby is taking no chances as the wise ones will note when they check the weights.
Their owners, therefore, show wisdom in keeping them out of sight, or perhaps, as some of the shrewder ones do, by running them when rather out of condition, and thus ensuring their defeat by adversaries really inferior to themselves. In this way the handicapper is deceived as to their true qualities, and is induced to weight them advantageously for the Omnium.
The handicapper had laughed, half wearily, half compassionately as he allotted it, muttering something about the jockey club robbing the cradle and the grave that poor old Major Meriwether, it was well known, hadn't any money to spare; what he did have was the gambler's instinct to sit into any game where the stakes were big.