very cent on Sis--"

"It ain't one race, it's six," snorted Crimmins. "It's Crimmins' way to
agitate his brain for a friend, but it ain't his way to be a plumb fool.
You can't shoot that bull con into me, Bud. I know you. I give you an
offer, friend and friend. You turn it down and 'cuse me of making you
play crooked. I'm done with you. It ain't Crimmins' way."

Billy Garrison eyed his former trainer and mentor steadily for a long
time. His lip was quivering.

"Damn your way!" he said hoarsely at length, and turned on his heel. His
hands were deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he swung out
of the stable. He was humming over and over the old music-hall favorite,
"Good-by, Sis"--humming in a desperate effort to keep his nerve. Billy
Garrison had touched bottom in the depths.

CHAPTER II.

THE HEAVY HAND OF FATE.

Garrison left Long Island for New York that night. When you are hard
hit the soul suffers a reflex-action. It recoils to its native soil.
New York was Garrison's home. He was a product of its sporting soil.
He loved the Great White Way. But he had drunk in the smell, the
intoxication of the track with his mother's milk. She had been from
the South; the land of straight women, straight men, straight living,
straight riding. She had brought blood--good, clean blood--to the
Garrison-Loring entente cordiale--a polite definition of a huge mistake.

From his mother Garrison had inherited his cool head, steady eye, and
the intuitive hands that could compel horse-flesh like a magnet. From
her he had inherited a peculiar recklessness and swift daring. From his
father--well, Garrison never liked to talk about his father. His mother
was a memory; his father a blank. He was a good-looking, bad-living
sprig of a straight family-tree. He had met his wife at the New Orleans
track, where her father, an amateur horse-owner, had two entries.
And she had loved him. There is good in every one. Perhaps she had
discovered it in Garrison's father where no one else had.

Her family threw her off--at least, when she came North with her
husband, she gradually dropped out of her home circle; dropped of
her own volition. Perhaps she was afraid that the good she had first
discovered in her husband had been seen through a magnifying-glass.
Her life with Garrison was a constant whirlwind of changing scene and
fortune--the perpetual merry--or sorry--go-round of a book-maker; going
from track to track, and from bad to wor