No one ever heard Hardshell complain. His health was always “tol’able,” his horses were always “tol’able fast,” his luck was “tol’able,” and after replying thus to inquiries he hummed a hymn and went away. He never was with the crowd of owners and bookmakers around hotels or restaurants, but lived in the stables; and when little Pete, the diminutive negro jockey, rode out of the paddock, Hardshell, a timothy straw in his mouth and trousers laced into the tops of disreputable boots, sauntered into the betting ring, went to the stand of a bookmaker who had been his friend for years, wagered two dollars that his horse would win, and, without looking to see what the odds were, went down to the rail to root for his horse. Few knew that Hardshell cherished either an ambition or an enmity--but he did. His ambition was to breed and train a champion colt, and the object of his hatred was Big Jim Long, gambler, bookmaker, sure thing man, and the head of the Long Investment Company--and the ambition and the hatred were associated. Long was the Long Investment Company so far as advertising and general knowledge went, but the real head sat at a desk in a suite of offices in the lower Broadway district in New York, and, so far as anyone knew, never had been near a race-track. Not even his name was to be found in connection with the Long Investment Company. All letters, remittances, and transfers from branch offices were addressed to James Long, but the man who opened them was Thomas J. Kirtin, whose business, according to the modest lettering on the door of the back room, which opened upon an entirely different corridor from that upon which the Long Investment Company fronted, was “Investments.” Kirtin’s brain had evolved the idea of applying the all Tontine game to betting upon horse-races, and he had organized the Long Investment Company. In addition to the promise of certain dividends, the company added the appeal to the gambling instinct in human beings. It claimed that the reason persons who bet upon horse-races fail to beat the bookmakers is that the bookmakers have the preponderance of capital. The small bettor could not withstand a run of losses and the gamblers could. It proposed to turn the tables: all bettors were to pool their capital with the Long Investment Company, which, with its elaborate system of doping horse-races, its exclusive sources of information from owners and jockeys who were “interested,” and its perfect system of laying bets which would assure investors of the best odds on each race, would beat the game. Further, it was not as if a bettor wagered all on one race; the company would bet on three, four, possibly six, races a day on different tracks, betting only on inside information, and the winnings would be pooled and divided. One hundred per cent was guaranteed, and more if the winnings were larger.