And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “They say he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from over near Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hard race than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndest woman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old or young, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he was forty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’d see the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or third place, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows he ain’t got the speed to outstep ’em. What does he do? Does he give up? Not he. He lets on to go crazy and begins to swear and rip around. Such language! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hear him. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead of him, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the first you know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once in front he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares his own horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers. Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threats and switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man that had had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger and was an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” he keeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’t hear him up in the stand. But them other drivers can hear him all right. “And then what does he do? As soon as the heat is finished he hurries up to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them to foul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest that he half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hitting one of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn and throwing him off his stride or something like that. “Now, Judge, I ask you, wasn’t he all right, if he was a woman-chaser? And that Henry the Eighth was just like him. He told the Pope to go hang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffs the same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet I gave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, now ain’t it?”