Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/231

 I can't sit down, and, for that matter, everybody seems to be standing on their seats, all chattering and laughing kind of nervous and elbowing each other this way and that. I hear a dozen horses' names. "Mad Hatter's a good thing!" . . . "Cirrus will win in a walk!" . . . "Boniface is a cinch at the weights!" . . . "Watch Knight Errant!" . . . Then, thirty thousand voices in one terrible roar which rolls across the field and echoes back: "They're off!"

I don't want no more twenty-thousand-dollar bets on no horse races when twenty thousand is all I got to my name. I put on ten years in the two minutes it took 'em to run that handicap! The big crowd has went cuckoo, howling and screaming like thirty thousand maniacs:. . . "Come on with Mad Hatter, come on with him, Jock!" "Use your whip, you dumbell!" "Boniface, Boniface, Boniface!" "Cirrus all the way!" "Knight Errant walks in!" "Aaaaah, look at the favorite run!"

I get swept off my perch, and the next thing I know I am half-ways down the steps to the field, pulled along by the yelling lunatics. Battling my way, I get to the fence, minus my hat, some buttons off my coat and the flap of a pocket. I hear 'em thundering into the stretch and then I see 'em bunched together on the far rail, a flying, bobbing mass of color. All of a sudden I let out a wild yell of joy. Out in front the jockey's arm rising and falling with the whip like he's beating a drum, is Knight Errant! I know Mr. Brock's color's; red cap, blue jacket with red bars. Knight Errant closed at three to one, not the five to