Читать книгу The Dark Highway - Arthur Gask - Страница 7

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VERY quickly the totalisator figures came up: Black Wolf £63/17/, Rattlesnake £5 (for each pound invested). £8740 had altogether been invested on the race. £90/10/ had gone on Black Wolf, and £382/10/on Rattlesnake.

The owner of Black Wolf came down off the grandstand looking unruffled and unconcerned. He smiled when he was congratulated, and when asked if he had expected Black Wolf to win he replied inscrutably: "Well, I thought he was pretty good."

But the girl with him, it was easy to see, was greatly excited. She was flushed and animated, and coming suddenly face to face with her, young Barton thought again, with a strangely quickening pulse, how delightfully pretty she was.

He was with Sellick, the trainer, and the latter stopped at once to congratulate James Dice.

"I hope you had a good win, Jim. Your gelding ran a splendid race."

The owner of Black Wolf smiled pleasantly.

"Not so bad, old man, thank you," he replied, "but it was perhaps a good thing for me Abimeleck wasn't there."

"You can bet your life on that," said Tom Sellick, looking very serious, "for, however good your animal is, I don't think the forty odd pounds Abimeleck had to give him would have brought the two together, and young Mr. Barton here will, I am sure, agree with me."

"Introduce me, Sellick," broke in Stanley, smiling. "I have not met this fortunate gentleman yet."

"This is Mr. Stanley Barton, Jim," began the trainer, "Mr. Eli's nephew. He——"

But old Sellick stopped, for he saw that James Dice was not listening. The owner of Black Wolf had turned right round and he was staring hard into the crowd. He had suddenly become pale, and it looked almost as if he were trying to master some great emotion.

"Uncle, uncle!" exclaimed the girl at his side in a reproving tone, "don't you hear? This gentleman is speaking to you," and she pulled him by the arm.

The big man turned round instantly.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," he apologised in confusion, "I'm so very sorry, but I recognised a man just then whom I had believed was dead. It gave me quite a shock." He passed his hand shakily across his forehead. "But you were saying—you were saying——"

"I was introducing you to Mr. Stanley Barton," replied the trainer, smiling, "Mr. Eli Barton's nephew."

James Dice shot a quick glance at young Barton, and then lifted his hat politely. "Very pleased, I am sure." He went on speaking rapidly. "And this is my niece, Miss Bevan. Margaret, this is Mr. Sellick." He smiled quite easily now—"I knew him years ago in Victoria, before I came over here."

The girl shook hands with Mr. Sellick and young Stanley, and the four stood chatting for some minutes.

Young Stanley had his eyes the whole time upon the girl, and a slight flush seemed to deepen the radiancy of her face when at length they said good-bye.

"Very decent fellow, that Dice," remarked the trainer, directly they were out of earshot, "and I'm glad his horse won. But I don't suppose he's got much out of it, except the stake. The dividend was too large for any one to have helped himself liberally. He couldn't have had much hope of his horse anyhow, and I expect Black Wolf's win was just one of those flukes that come to racing men, sometimes. They've had a cast-iron certainty in their hands, and yet they've not known it, until too late."

Trainer Sellick was quite convinced that he had sized up the situation pretty accurately, and undoubtedly for the first few minutes after the race the public generally held much the same opinion.

The outsider's win was quite unexpected, they told one another, and the owner-trainer had had only a few pounds on. He had missed the chance of a life-time and would be kicking himself about it until the very day that he died. It had been a 'skinner' too, for the city bookmakers; none of them, probably, had ever had Black Wolf's name in his books.

And then—somehow these ideas began all at once to undergo a subtle change, and very quickly quite different notions took possession of the knowing ones upon the course.

No, it had not been an unexpected win, they now said. The owner had gone solidly for his animal, and nearly all the money paid out from the totalisator had been on his investment alone. He had been seen himself drawing nearly £5000 in notes from the paying-out window.

Rumours swept round like eddies in a stream, and then surmises began to crystallise out into solid facts.

Black Wolf had been heavily backed away from the course, and the city bookmakers had been hard hit. In fact, they had been most methodically tapped all round. Pete Maloney, the biggest bookmaker in the State, admitted it frankly and without any ill- feeling. He said so openly on the grandstand. It was true, he explained, that not large sums had been invested on Black Wolf but, at the odds offered against the horse on the previous day quite a small bet would soon have taken all the stuffing out of any turf accountant's book. He himself had given James Dice a thousand to ten, and taken the bet twice, while his friend, Walter Hind, had been let in for exactly the same amount.

The owner of Black Wolf, moreover, had shown himself a great strategist in placing his commissions. The previous afternoon, it appeared, he had approached bookmaker after bookmaker, and had secured bets with them all. None of his wagers was for a large amount, such was the cleverness of his plan, but he had been laid the odds to tens and fives and in some cases even to only threes and twos. Nearly always he had been accommodated at a hundred to one, and he had betted fearlessly, making no place bets but going always for an outright win.

The racing crowd generally, with their first disappointment over, were intensely interested in the big coup that had seemingly been brought off and, although all losers themselves, they were not chary of expressing their admiration for the pluck that the owner of Black Wolf had shown.

"A mad thing to do, though," remarked a prominent racing man scornfully, "but a devilish plucky one all the same. Just fancy going like that for an outright win, with Abimeleck in the acceptances! Dice must have been off his chump at the time."

But long before the afternoon had waned people were not quite so sure that James Dice had indulged in so reckless a gamble as had at first been assumed. A remarkable story began to get about.

A man in the half-crown Derby enclosure, so it was said, had had five pounds on Black Wolf. Quite a number of people had watched him draw the dividend afterwards, and they had crowded curiously round to find out what had made him back the horse. But, at first, the man would offer no explanation and, beyond the cock-sure assertion, many times repeated, that he had known all the while that he was 'on a cert.' no one could get anything out of him. A few long beers judiciously administered, however, had soon loosened his tongue, and an interesting tale he had then proceeded to tell. According to him, Black Wolf had been anything but the despised and untried animal that people had imagined. Instead, he had been put through as good a test as anyone could wish, and he had been asked a very searching question before being even entered for the Christmas Cup. He had beaten a no less useful performer than the well known Basil's Pride, in a stripped gallop over a mile and a half, with a stone the worse of the weights, and everyone would remember that Basil had won the Kidman Cup at the Port, not two months ago. Oh yes, the man averred, he knew what he was talking about, and was quite as well aware as anyone that Basil had been sold for fifteen hundred guineas to Mr. French, of Melbourne. He knew that, but he knew also what other people did not know, and that was that French was a relation of James Dice and had lent him Basil for a week. The horse when he had been sold had not been taken straight to Melbourne, as people thought, but the journey had been broken somewhere, he would not say where, and the trial he referred to had then taken place. It had all been kept very secret, and Basil's Pride had been altered in appearance, so that none of Dice's station hands should recognise him. He had been hog-maned for one thing, and the white marks on his forehead coloured out for another. Oh, yes, it had all been beautifully arranged, and they deserved every dollar they had won.

Such was the man's story, and much further interesting information would doubtless have been elicited but for the potency of more long beers. The narrator had then became pugnacious, and, mainly, no doubt, to prevent his being robbed of his winnings, a kind-hearted sergeant of police had shut him up in the police room for the remainder of the afternoon.

The public were, of course, greatly interested, and a representative of the Press endeavoured to get in touch with James Dice and find out how much of the story was true. But the owner of Black Wolf was nowhere to be encountered. He had left the racecourse, so it was said, an hour before.