Tradition was that he came from somewhere in Pennsylvania, as he spoke sometimes of the horses “up the valley”; but beyond the fact that he had a farm in Tennessee, where he bred and trained the horses he raced, nothing was set down in the “Who’s Who” of the turf. He was called Hardshell because he had once explained the difference between the Hardshell Baptists, to which denomination he belonged, and the Washfoots. He was an old man, thin and poorly dressed in baggy garments which carried the odor of horses and were covered with horse hairs. He loved horses, lived with them and for them and by them. In those days he emerged from his hibernation on the Tennessee farm when racing started at New Orleans and moved northward to Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, and in the fall he retraced the route and disappeared. He usually could be found working with some horse and humming an old hymn, and occasionally, when forgetful, he sang hymns aloud while brushing the horses. He was honest, which fact set him apart from the majority of the persons who follow horse-racing. According to the unwritten law of the turf, it was all right for a millionaire to race horses for sport and the purses, but a poor man was expected to do the best he could, dodge the feed man’s bill when possible, get a shade the best of the odds, keep under cover the fact that one of his horses was fit for a race until the odds were right, and, if possible, sell one or two colts to the wealthy owners at a fancy price to even the losses on the season. Hardshell Gaines violated all these rules. He was poor. He bred and raced horses because he loved them and loved the sport. He wagered two dollars on each horse he entered in a race, never more or less. He depended upon winning purses to meet expenses, and he refused to sell his best colts at any price. Each year he emerged from Tennessee with three or four fair selling-platers, a string of two-year-olds from which he hoped to develop a champion, and Sword of Gideon, better known as Swored at Gideon, his alleged stake horse and the pride of the Big Bend stables. Some of the race followers believed Hardshell to be rich. The suspicious ones (and suspicion has its breeding place on race-tracks) thought the old man laid big bets through secret agents whenever he was ready to win a race. When, at not too frequent intervals, one of his horses won, the wise ones nodded and whispered that old Hardshell had made another killing. Others of us who knew how many of the purses offered in selling races must be won to feed, care for, and transport eighteen or twenty horses, estimated his financial rating more closely. I knew there were times when second or third money in cheap races was welcome to help pay feed bills and jockey fees, and that in several lean times colts had disappeared from the Big Bend stables, having been sold secretly at low prices.