Sap had went up to 8 to 1, and instead of a hundred smackers I bet a thousand.
He finished ahead by three len’ths, probably the most surprised horse in history. Honor Bright got the place, but only by a hair. Only One, after being detained for some reason another, come faster at the end than any horse ever run before. And Mercer give him an unmerciful walloping, pretending to himself, probably, that the hoss was its master.
We come back to our table. The gals sunk down in their chairs. Ella was blubbering and Kate was as white as a ghost. Daley finally joined us, looking like he’d had a stroke. He asked for a drink and I give him my flask.
“I can’t understand it!” he says. “I don’t know what happened!”
“You don’t!” hollered Kate. “I’ll tell you what happened. You stole our money! Twelve hundred dollars! You cheat!”
“Oh, shut your fool mouth!” says Daley.
And another Romance was knocked for a row of sour apple trees.
Kate brought the mail in the dining room Monday morning. They was a letter for her and one for me. She read hers and they was a couple of tears in her eyes.
“Mercer’s quit riding,” she says. “This is a farewell note. He’s going to Oklahoma.”
Ella picked up my envelope.
“Who’s this from?” she says.
“Give it here,” I said, and took it away from her. “It’s just the statement from Haynes, the bookie.”
“Well, open it up,” she said.
“What for?” said I. “You know how much you lose, don’t you?”
“He might of made a mistake, mightn’t he?” she says.
So I opened up the envelope and there was the check for $8,000.
“Gosh!” I said. “It looks like it was me that made the mistake!” And I laid the check down where her and Kate could see it. They screamed and I caught Ella just as she was falling off the chair.
“What does this mean?” says Kate.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I was kind of rattled Saturday, and when I come to make my bet I got balled up and wrote down Sap. And I must of went crazy and played him for a thousand men.”
“But where’s our statement, mine and Sis’?” says Ella.
“That’s my mistake again,” I said. “I wrote out your ticket, but I must of forgot to turn it in.”
They jumped up and come at me, and before I could duck I was kissed from both sides at once.
“O Sis!” yelps the Mrs. “Just think! We didn’t lose our twelve hundred! We didn’t lose nothing at all. We win eight thousand dollars!”
“Try and get it!” I says.
V
Katie Wins a Home
Oh yes, we been back here quite a wile. And we’re liable to be here quite a wile. This town’s good enough for me and it suits the Mrs. too, though they didn’t neither one of us appreciate it till we’d give New York a try. If I was running the South Bend Boosters’ club, I’d make everybody spend a year on the Gay White Way. They’d be so tickled when they got to South Bend that you’d never hear them razz the old burg again. Just yesterday we had a letter from Katie, asking us would we come and pay her a visit. She’s a regular New Yorker now. Well, I didn’t have to put up no fight with my Mrs. Before I could open my pan she says, “I’ll write and tell her we can’t come; that you’re looking for a job and don’t want to go nowheres just now.”
Well, they’s some truth in that. I don’t want to go nowheres and I’ll take a job if it’s the right kind. We could get along on the interest from Ella’s money, but I’m tired of laying round. I didn’t do a tap of work all the time I was east and I’m out of the habit, but the days certainly do drag when a man ain’t got nothing to do and if I can find something where I don’t have to travel, I’ll try it out.
But the Mrs. has still got most of what the old man left her and all and all, I’m glad we made the trip. I more than broke even by winning pretty close to $10,000 on the ponies down there. And we got Katie off our hands, which was one of the objects of us going in the first place—that and because the two gals wanted to see Life. So I don’t grudge the time we spent, and we had some funny experiences when you look back at them. Anybody does that goes on a tour like that with a cuckoo like Katie. You hear a lot of songs and gags about mother-in-laws. But I could write a book of them about sister-in-laws that’s twenty years old and pretty and full of peace and good will towards Men.
Well, after the blow-off with Daley, Long Island got too slow, besides costing us more than we could afford. So the gals suggested moving back in Town, to a hotel called the Graham on Sixty-seventh Street that somebody had told them was reasonable.
They called it a family hotel, but as far as I could see, Ella and I was the only ones there that had ever forced two dollars on the clergy. Outside of the transients, they was two song writers and a couple of gals that had their hair pruned and wrote for the papers, and the rest of the lodgers was boys that had got penned into a sixteen-foot ring with Benny Leonard by mistake. They looked like they’d spent many an evening hanging onto the ropes during the rush hour.
When we’d stayed there two days, Ella and Katie was ready to pack up again.
“This is just a joint,” said Ella. “The gals may be all right, but they’re never in, only to sleep. And the men’s impossible; a bunch of
