Humorous stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"I'm with you, John," chuckled Bunch, and half an hour later we
were on our way | to the track, after having sent notes to our
wives that important business kept us chained to the post of duty,
but if they would meet us at the Hotel Astor at 7 p.m. we'd all
dine together.
Bunch had just tied his Bubble to a tree at the track and was in
the act of giving it a long cool drink of gasolene and some cracked
oats, when Flash Harvey bore down on us and made a touch for the
turn-out.
"Say, Bunch!" chirped Flash, "lend me the choo-choo for half an
hour, will you? I have my sister and a dream cousin of ours from
Hartford here this aft. and I'm eager to show them how I can pound
a public road with a rowdy-cart. I'll take good care of the
machine and be back in two hours, honest, Bunch!"
Flash being an old friend of ours Bunch had to fall for the spiel
and loaned him the Bubble forthwith.
Ten minutes later we were so busy listening to the sure-things
falling from the eager tongues of the various friends we met that
we quite forgot all about Flash and the busy barouche.
The first cinch-builder we fell over was Harry McDonough, the
inventor of the stingless mosquito now in use on his Jersey farm.
Harry has the mosquito game down so fine that he's going to take a
double sextette of them into vaudeville next season.
He has trained these twelve skeets to sing "Zobia Grassa," and Al
Holbrook has promised to teach them a Venetian dances.
Harry offered us four winners in the first race and two cigars. He
told us if we lost to smoke the cigars carefully and we'd forget
our troubles and our names; but if we won we could use the cigars
as firecrackers.
Then we ran across Jeff D'Angelis, the composer of the new tune now
played on the automobile horns.
Jeff hadn't picked out a horse to win any race because his loyalty
to sneeze-wagons is so intense that he won't even drink a horse's
neck.
He explained that he only came to the race track to show the horses
his smoke-buggy and make them shiver.
George Yates, the inventor of the machinery for removing sunburn
from pickles, was there and he tried to present us with a sure
winner in the third race.
A little later on we discovered that the horse Yates was doing a
rave over had been dead for four years and that the card from which
he was lifting his dope was the program of the meet at Sheepshead
in 1896.
Some kind and thoughtful stranger had lifted fifty cent| from
George's surplus and in return had stung him with an ancient echo
of the pittypats.
Our next adventure was with Joe Miron, the famous horse trainer and
inventor of the only blue mare in captivity at Elmhurst.
"Say, why didn't I see you guys before the first race; I had a
plush-covered pipe!" yelled Joe.
"I had that race beat to a stage wait," Joe went on,
enthusiastically. "Why, all you had to do was play 'The Goblin
Man' to win and 'Murderallo' for a place--it was just like getting
money from the patent medicine business."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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