ever mistake your
hosses--nobody that's been watchin' the way they run."

Pitkin craned his neck and snorted with wrath. Old Man Curry had
drawn two crosses side by side, and the inference was plain.

"That's your notion, is it?" said he, rising. "Well, one thing is a
mortal cinch, Curry; you'll never catch me psalm singing round a race
track, and any time I want to preach, I'll hire a church! Put that in
your pipe and smoke it!"

"I ain't smokin', thankee, I'm chewin' mostly," remarked the old
gentleman to Pitkin's vanishing coat tails. "Well, now, looks like I
made him sort of angry. What is it that Solomon wrote 'bout the anger
of a fool?"

They used to say that the meanest man in the world was the Mean Man
from Maine, but this is a slander on the good old Pine Tree State,
for Henry M. Pitkin never was east of the Mississippi River in his
life. He claimed Iowa as his native soil, and all that Iowa could do
about it was to issue a warrant for his arrest on a charge connected
with the misappropriation of funds. Young Mr. Pitkin escaped over the
State line westward, beating the said warrant a nose in a whipping
finish, and after a devious career covering many years and many
States he turned up on the Jungle Circuit, bringing with him a string
of horses, a gentle, soft-spoken old negro trainer, an Irish jockey
named Mulligan, and two stable hands, each as black as the ace of
spades.

The Jungle Circuit has always been peculiarly rich in
catch-as-catch-can burglars and daylight highwaymen, but after they
had studied Mr. Pitkin's system closely these gentlemen refused to
enter into a protective alliance with him, for, as Grouchy O'Connor
remarked, "the sucker hadn't never heard that there ought to be
honour among thieves." Pitkin would shear a black sheep as close to
the shivering hide as he would shear a white one, and the horses of
the Pitkin stable performed according to price, according to
investment, according to orders--according to everything in the world
but agreement, racing form, and honest endeavour. In ways that are
dark and tricks that are vain the heathen Chinee at the top of his
heathenish bent would have been no match for Mr. Henry M. Pitkin,
who could have taken the shirt away from a Chinese river pirate.

The double-cross would have been an excellent racing trade-mark for
the Pitkin stable, because Pitkin had double-crossed every one who
ever trusted him, every one with whom he had come in contac