And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung over their shoulders same as I had been doing all the year before. I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and more important too. One thing’s about as good as another if you take it just right. I’ve often said that. Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there was a fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor or something like that, but he wasn’t stuck on himself. There are some of that kind are all right and he was one of the ones. He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start anything--she wasn’t that kind--and her eyes and mine happened to meet. You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach. She had on a soft dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. She wasn’t stuck on herself and she could talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or something like that. What I mean is, she was O.K. I think maybe her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or a dry goods store in their home town, or something like that. She never told me and I never asked. My own people are all O.K. too, when you come to that. My grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he was--but never mind that. * * * * * The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow setting there with the two girls left them and went down to make a bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn’t talk big and noisy and let everyone around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn’t that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls what horse he’d bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all half got to their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do when they’ve got money down on a race, and the horse they bet on is up there pretty close at the end, and they think maybe he’ll come on with a rush, but he never does because he hasn’t got the old juice in him, come right down to it. And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18 pace and there was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in his string, but Bob didn’t own him. He was a horse owned by a Mr. Mathers down at Marietta, Ohio.