"Show him up, 'Lisha! Show him up!" shrilled Mose, and the bay responded with a lengthened stride which gave him an advantage to be measured in inches, but Black Bill gamely fought his way back on even terms again. Miss Amber dropped behind. The boy on Regulator was using his whip, but he might just as well have been beating a carpet with it. Third money was his at the paddock gate. Seventy-five yards--fifty yards--twenty-five yards--and still the two heads bobbed side by side. Jockey Michael Grogan, hero of many a hard finish; cool, calculating, and unmoved by the deafening clamour beating down from the packed grand stand, measured the distance with his eye--and took a chance. His rawhide whip whistled through the air. Black Bill, unused to punishment, faltered for the briefest fraction of a second, and came on again, but too late. The presiding judge, an unprejudiced man with a stubby grey moustache, squinted across an imaginary line and saw the bay head before he saw the black. "_Jee-roozalum, my happy home!_" said he. "That was an awful tight fit, but the Curry horse won--by a whisker. Hang up the numbers. Lord! But that Elisha is a better horse than I gave him credit for being!" "Yeh," said the associate judge, "and the nigger outrode Grogan, if anybody should ask you. He had a chance--if he hadn't let that horse's head flop to go the bat!" "It wasn't that," said the other quickly. "The horse flinched when he hit him." "I been photographed and interviewed till I'm black in the face," complained Old Man Curry, "and now you come along. You're worse than them confounded reporters!" "You bet I am," was the calm response of the Bald-faced Kid, "because I know more. And yet I don't know enough to satisfy me. Somebody played Elisha, and it wasn't me. You never went near the betting ring. I watched you." "My money did. Quite a gob of it." "And you--you thought he'd win?" "Didn't I tell you to bet on him?" "Hell!" wailed the Bald-faced Kid. "He was _lame_--he couldn't walk the night before! Bet on him? How could I after I'd seen him in that fix?" "Frank," said the old man, "you believe everything you see, don't you?" The Bald-faced Kid sat down and took his head in his hands. "Tell it to me, old-timer," said he humbly. "I'm such a wise guy that it hurts me; but something has come off here that's a mile over my head. Tell me; I'm no mind reader." Old Man Curry combed his beard reflectively and gazed through the tack-room door into the dusk of the summer evening. "Son," said he at length, "you never swapped hosses much, did you?" "Never owned any to swap," was the muffled response.