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"What, now?" asked Robbins, fingering his empty notebook. "Cherchez la femme," said Dumars, lighting a cigarette. "Try Lady Bellairs." This piece of femininity was the race-track favourite of the season. Being feminine, she was erratic in her gaits, and there were a few heavy losers about town who had believed she could be true. The reporters applied for information. Mr. Morin? Certainly not.
But then Miss Alathea spoke. She had listened to all the talk about the fire, the incendiary, the pursuit, and its dreadful possibilities of lynching, with the keenest of distress. Now the Colonel's calm declaration that, presently, they would be off to the race-track which he had sworn forever to taboo, shifted her mind suddenly from those unpleasant topics.
The initial lines ran: "'Oh, damn everything! exclaimed Percival Holcombe, as he dropped languidly into a deep-seated leather chair by the club window which commanded a view of the noisy street crowded with fashion and frivolity, wherein the afternoon's sun, freed from its enthralling mists, which all day long had jealously obscured his beams, was gloating o'er the panels of the carriages of noblemen who were returning from race-track and park, and the towhead of the little sweeper who plied his humble trade which earned his scanty supper that he ate miles away from that gay quarter wherein Percival Holcombe, who " Rosella paused for sheer breath.
That is the way I felt about it, and my only excuse is that I couldn't help having a good time. For instance, in the afternoon of the Fourth of July all the lepers gathered at the race-track for the sports. I had wandered away from the Superintendent and the physicians in order to get a snapshot of the finish of one of the races. It was an interesting race, and partisanship ran high.
Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour.
Tiring of this as they came to the site of an old exposition bicycle race-track, they ran up and down the grass-covered sides until Perry reminded them that the morning would be over before they knew it, and started on a dogtrot for the goal. Cans there were in profusion, also a fascinating array of wreckage of other nature in this dump, which lay just north of the park.
After a silence, the Kid asked another question: "Well, at that, the race-track game is no game for a married man, is it?" "M-m-well," answered the patriarch thoughtfully, "that's as how a man's wife looks at it. Some of 'em think it ain't no harm to gamble s'long's you can win, but the average woman, Frank, she don't want the hosses runnin' for her bread and butter.
"Do you mean that gentleman with the ruddy face and the white beard?" he inquired. "That's the old pirate," asserted the colonel. "Why, that's the man you wanted to introduce me to at the race-track in Baltimore Saturday." "Bless my heart, so I did!" he remembered. "I thought it might relieve him to tell his troubles to you. It isn't too late yet.
By leaving a trail of frightened horses, men and women, and tearing through the gloom as though streets were his private race-track I myself as much frightened as any at the roaring speed of the cars and the possibilities of the road we arrived at seven, and by eight were seated to a course dinner of the most gratifying character.
It happened that a well-known "sporting man," that is to say a race-track frequenter, came along wearing a red necktie, and the raiders, taking him for a Bolshevik, fell upon him and pretty nearly mauled the life out of him.
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