Ah! she ’ad The ’Angman beat, and ding-dong with this Parrot! It was all he could do to keep from calling out. With a rush and a cludding of hoofs they passed--the blazed nose just behind The Parrot’s bay nose--dead heat all but, with The Hangman beaten a good length! “There ’e goes, Jimmy! See the blank scuttlin’ down the ’ill like a blinkin’ rabbit. That’ll be in to-morrow’s paper, that trial will. Ah! but ’ow to read it--that’s the point.” The horses had been wheeled and were sidling back; Polman was going forward on his cob. ‘Jimmy’ jumped down. Whatever that fellow had to say, he meant to hear. It was his horse! Narrowly avoiding the hoofs of his hot, fidgeting mare, he said sharply: “What about it?” Polman never looked you in the face; his speech came as if not intended to be heard by anyone: “Tell Mr. Shrewin how she went.” “Had a bit up my sleeve. If I’d hit her a smart one, I could ha’ landed by a length or more.” “That so?” said ‘Jimmy’ with a hiss. “Well, _don’t_ you hit her; she don’t want hittin’. You remember that.” The boy said sulkily: “All right!” “Take her home,” said Polman. Then, with that reflective averted air of his, he added: “She was carrying eight stone, Mr. Shrewin; you’ve got a good one there. She’s The Hangman at level weights.” Something wild leaped up in ‘Jimmy’--The Hangman’s form unrolled itself before him in the air--he had a horse--he dam’ well had a horse! IV But how delicate is the process of backing your fancy! The planting of a commission--what tender and efficient work before it will flower! That sixth sense of the racing man, which, like the senses of savages in great forests, seizes telepathically on what is not there, must be dulled, duped, deluded. George Pulcher had the thing in hand. One might have thought the gross man incapable of such a fairy touch, such power of sowing with one hand and reaping with the other. He intimated rather than asserted that Calliope and The Parrot were one and the same thing. “The Parrot,” he said, “couldn’t win with seven stone--no use thinkin’ of this Callĭōpe.” Local opinion was the rock on which, like a great tactician, he built. So long as local opinion was adverse, he could dribble money on in London; the natural jump-up from every long shot taken was dragged back by the careful radiation of disparagement from the seat of knowledge. ‘Jimmy’ was the fly in his ointment of those balmy early weeks while snapping up every penny of long odds, before suspicion could begin to work from the persistence of enquiry. Half-a-dozen times he found the ‘little cuss within an ace of blowing the gaff on his own blinkin’ mare’; seemed unable to run his horse down; the little beggar’s head was swellin’! Once ‘Jimmy’ had even got up and gone out, leaving a gin and bitters untasted on the bar. Pulcher improved on his absence in the presence of a London tout. “Saw the trial meself! Jimmy don’t like to think he’s got a stiff ’un.”