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Updated: June 11, 2025
You people read the papers and believe what you see in 'em. The papers! I tell you stryte the worst pack of rogues and bookmakers in England." A simple old man of ninety, who had lost his teeth, beckoned to him and paid him a shilling for his tip. The jockey took him aside and whispered impressively into his ear. Then he said, in a loud voice: "Are you satisfied, sir?"
Far back in the Dark Ages, when his body was more on a par with his legs, it was rumoured that Mat had himself won hunt-races. "Then my body went on, or rayther spread out," he would tell his intimates, "while me legs stayed where they was. So Mat become a trainer 'stead of a jockey." And Mat's legs were not the only part of him that had stayed as they were in those remote days.
I carried the lamp over, and placing it in the little cleared-out space among them, began to examine the bottles with idle curiosity. "Wild Crab Apple," "Jockey Club," "Parma Violet," "Heliotrope," I read on the dainty labels, lifting out the ground-glass corks and smelling the lingering fragrance which yet attached to each empty vial. Of these there must have been two dozen or more.
It stood in front of a small coppice, a creepered, plain-fronted, little brick house, with a garden still full of sunflowers, tenanted by the old jockey, Pettance, his widowed daughter, and her three small children. "That talkative old scoundrel," as Winton always called him, was still employed in the Mildenham stables, and his daughter was laundress to the establishment.
"Good gracious, how recklessly that boy rides!" one jockey observed to another; "but he has got a good grip with his knees all the same." "Yes, he sits like a daisy," the second replied, critically; "but mind my word, Lady Clare will throw him yet. She never could stand anybody but the princess on her back: and that was the reason her Royal Highness was so fond of her.
He is also as great a Buck as George Hanger, as Jehu, or Jockey of Norfolk, and as famous, almost, as the late Sir Maurice Vibart." "Ah!" said Barnabas. "And since the retirement of Mr. Brummell, he and the Marquis of Jerningham have to some extent taken his place and become the Arbiters of Fashion." "Oh!" said Barnabas.
Behind him rode three lancers, their lances couched, their horses at speed; the pace was tremendous, and the excitement intense: for sometimes, as the leading horseman of the pursuit neared the fugitive, he would bend suddenly upon the saddle, and swerving to the right or the left, totally evade him, while again at others, with a loud cry of bold defiance, rising in his stirrups, he would press on, and with a shake of his bridle that bespoke the jockey, almost distance the enemy.
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?
I received them from Suss, the jockey, while you were out riding this afternoon." "For the black?" Heinz enquired. "Certainly, my lord. It's a pity about the splendid stallion. But, as you know, he has the staggers, and when I struck him on the coronet he stood as if rooted to the earth, and the equerry, who was there, said that the disease was proved.
Considerable interest having developed among the followers of the sport of kings at Tia Juana race-track anent the entry of Panchito in the Thanksgiving Handicap, and the dope books yielding nothing, your correspondent hied him to the office of the secretary of the Lower California Jockey Club; whereupon he was regaled with the following extraordinary tale: Two days ago a Mexican rode into Tia Juana from the south.
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