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At the Saratoga meeting that year there were a lot of men from home. Dave Williams and Arthur Mulford and Jerry Myers and others. Then there was a lot from Louisville and Lexington Henry Rieback knew but I didn’t. They were professional gamblers and Henry Rieback’s father is one too. He is what is called a sheet writer and goes away most of the year to the tracks. In the winter when he is home in Beckersville he don’t stay there much but goes away to cities and deals faro. He is a nice man and generous, is always sending Henry presents, a bicycle and a gold watch and a boy scout suit of clothes and things like that.

My own father is a lawyer. He’s all right, but don’t make much money and can’t buy me things and anyway I’m getting so old now I don’t expect it. He never said nothing to me against Henry, but Hanley Turner and Tom Tumberton’s fathers did. They said to their boys that money so come by is no good and they didn’t want their boys brought up to hear gamblers’ talk and be thinking about such things and maybe embrace them.

That’s all right and I guess the men know what they are talking about, but I don’t see what it’s got to do with Henry or with horses either. That’s what I’m writing this story about. I’m puzzled. I’m getting to be a man and want to think straight and be O. K. , and there’s something I saw at the race meeting at the eastern track I can’t figure out.

I can’t help it, I’m crazy about thoroughbred horses. I’ve always been that way. When I was ten years old and saw I was growing to be big and couldn’t be a rider I was so sorry I nearly died. Harry Hellinfinger in Beckersville, whose father is Postmaster, is grown up and too lazy to work, but likes to stand around in the street and get up jokes on boys like sending them to a hardware store for a gimlet to bore square holes and other jokes like that. He played one on me. He told me that if I would eat a half a cigar I would be stunted and not grow any more and maybe could be a rider. I did it. When father wasn’t looking I took a cigar out of his pocket and gagged it down some way. It made me awful sick and the doctor had to be sent for, and then it did no good. I kept right on growing. It was a joke. When I told what I had done and why most fathers would have whipped me but mine didn’t.

Well, I didn’t get stunted and didn’t die. It serves Harry Hellinfinger right. Then I made up my mind I would like to be a stable boy, but had to give that up too. Mostly niggers do that work and I knew father wouldn’t let me go into it. No use to ask him.

If you’ve never been crazy about thoroughbreds it’s because you’ve never been around where they are much and don’t know any better. They’re beautiful. There isn’t anything so lovely and clean and full of spunk and honest and everything as some race horses. On the big horse farms that are all around our town Beckersville there are tracks and the horses run in the early morning. More than a thousand times I’ve got out of bed before daylight and walked two or three miles to the tracks. Mother wouldn’t of let me go but father always says, “Let him alone.” So I got some bread out of the bread box and some butter and jam, gobbled it and lit out.

At the tracks you sit on the fence with men, whites and niggers, and they chew tobacco and talk, and then the colts are brought out. It’s early and the grass is covered with shiny dew and in another field a man is plowing and they are frying things in a shed where the track niggers sleep, and you know how a nigger can giggle and laugh and say things that make you laugh. A white man can’t do it and some niggers can’t but a track nigger can every time.