A filly named Tamarisk was the favorite in the fourth race and Daley played her for eight hundred smackers at 4 to 5. The gals trailed along with $8 apiece and she win from here to Worcester. The fifth was the one that Daley had an entry in—a dog named Fly-by-Night. It was different in the daytime. Mercer had the mount and done the best he could, which was finish before supper. Nobody bet, so nobody was hurt.
“He’s just a green colt,” Daley told us. “I wanted to see how he’d behave.”
“Well,” I said, “I thought he behaved like a born caboose.”
Daley liked the Waterbury entry in the last and him and the gals played it and win. All told, Daley was $4,000 ahead on the day and Ella and Kate had picked up $160 between them. They wanted to kiss everybody on the way out. Daley sent us to the car to wait for him. He wanted to see Mercer a minute. After a wile he come out and brought Mercer along and introduced him. He’s a good-looking kid only for a couple of blotches on his pan and got an under lip and chin that kind of lags behind. He was about Kate’s height, and take away his Adams apple and you could mail him to Duluth for six cents. Him and Kate got personal right away and she told him how different he looked now than in his riding makeup. He said he had a new outfit that he’d of wore if he’d knew she was looking on. So I said I hoped he didn’t expect to ride Fly-by-Night round the track and keep a suit new, and he laughed, and Daley didn’t seem to enjoy the conversation and said we’d have to be going, but when we started off, Kate and Mercer give each other a smile with a future in it. She’s one of these gals that can’t help from looking open house, even if the guy takes after a pelican.
Daley moved to our table that night and after that we eat breakfast and supper with him pretty near every day. After breakfast the gals would go down to New York to spend what they had win the day before, and I’ll admit that Daley give us many a winner. I begin betting a little of my own jack, but I stuck the proceeds in the old sock. I ain’t superstitious about living off a woman’s money as long as you’re legally married, but at the clip the two gals was going, it looked like their old man’s war profits was on the way to join their maker, and the more jack I laid by, the less sooner I would have to go to work.
We’d meet every afternoon at the track and after the races Daley’d bring us back to the hotel. After supper we’d set round and chin or play rummy or once in a wile we’d go in Town to a show or visit one of the road houses near the Decker. The mail service on Long Island’s kind of rotten and they’s a bunch of road houses that hasn’t heard of prohibition.
During the time we’d lived in Town Katie had got acquainted with three or four birds that liked her well enough to take her places where they wasn’t no cover charge, but since we’d moved to the Decker we hadn’t heard from none of them. That is, till a few days after we’d met Daley, when she told us that one of the New York boys, a guy named Goldberg, had called up and wanted her to come in and see a show with him. He’s a golf champion or something. Well, Daley offered to drive her in, but she said no, she’d rather go on the train and Goldberg was going to meet her. So she went, and Daley tried to play cards with Ella and I, but he was too restless and finally snuck up to his room.
They wasn’t no question about his feelings toward Kate. He was always trying to fix it to be alone with her, but I guess it was the first time in her life when she didn’t have to do most of the leading and she kept him at arm’s len’th. Her and Ella had many a battle. Ella told her that the first thing she knowed he’d get discouraged and walk out on her; that she’d ought to quit monking and give him to understand that she was ready to yes him when he spoke up. But Katie said she guessed she could run her own love affairs as she’d had a few more of them than Ella.
So Ella says: “Maybe you have, but which one of us has got the husband?”
“You, thank the Lord!” says Katie.
“Thank him twice,” I said.
Kate didn’t come home from her New York party till two o’clock and she overslept herself till it was too late to go down again and shop. So we all drove over to the track with Daley and most of the way over he acted like a child. Katie kept talking about what a good show she seen and had a grand time, and so forth, and he pretended he wasn’t listening. Finally she cut it out and give him the
