For four years he rode races on the flat, at tracks all over America. During these four years he made as much money as the average man makes in a lifetime, and at the end of it had nothing. To him money meant only expensive meals, clothes remarkable for colors and patterns, wine, women of a sort, and large yellow diamonds. At eighteen he was an old man. His face was yellow and drawn; he had ceased to be “Kid” O’Keefe and become “Jaundice.” He was gaining weight and beginning to pay the penalty of the carouses which followed each temporary period of prosperity. For a year he fought to hold his standing. His mounts became fewer and fewer. When the owners ceased to employ him to ride on the flat, he became a steeplechase jockey. Riding steeplechasers in races means in the majority of cases moral and physical suicide. Jaundice had no fear of physical consequence, nor any conception of morality. With two drinks of whisky poured into his outraged body, he would have tried to make his mount jump the Grand Cañon, had the course led in that direction. Falls and broken bones failed to break his nerve, but his subconscious honesty was shattered. On the flat he never had ridden a crooked race. He was restrained by no consciousness of right or wrong. He tried always to win because he loved the horses he rode. Over the jumps he had no such scruples. The steeplechase horses were “has-beens” like himself and entitled to no consideration. He commenced to ride queer-looking races. He was nineteen when he fell off the favorite in a steeplechase race to permit an outsider to win and the stewards ruled him off the tracks for one year. What Jaundice did in that year of banishment he alone knew in detail. Barred from the only home and the only associates he had ever known, the great loneliness came upon him. He was broke. He stole and was sent to prison. When the suspension was lifted he went back to the tracks. He had grown heavier and his eyes and his mind were blurred by drink. He lived with the horses, attaching himself to the stable for which he had been a star jockey, and lived in the stalls and the cars. His love of the animals themselves had waned. Drudgery and vicious living had warped even that instinct. When he dared he became a tout, whispering information to petty gamblers at the edge of the betting ring. When he left the tracks at night it was to betray stable information to bartenders in return for drinks. When he was twenty-two there remained two loves by which it was proved that all good can not be smelted out of a human being. One was for Doc Grausman, the gallant bay stake horse of the stable, whose dam he had ridden to victory many times. The other was for Lord James.