Porter was aghast. Were all the Furies in league against him? He was more or less a believer in lucky and unlucky days, but he had never experienced anything quite so bad as this. He, the one innocent man in the transaction, having lost almost his last dollar, and having been saddled with a bad horse, was now accused of being the perpetrator of the villainy; and the insinuation was backed up by such a mass of circumstantial evidence. No wonder he flushed and stood silent, lost for words to express his indignation.
“Speak up, Mr. Porter,” said the Steward, kindly. “Those that lost on Lucretia are swearing the mare was pulled.”
“And they're right,” blurted out Porter. “I know what the mare can do; she can make hacks of that bunch. She was stopped, and interfered with, and given all the worst of it from start to finish; but my money was burnt up with the public's. I never pulled a horse in my life, and I'm too old to begin now.”
“I believe that,” declared the Steward, emphatically. “I've known you, John Porter, for forty years, man and boy, and there never was anything crooked. But we've got to clear this up. Racing isn't what it used to be--it's on the square now, and we want the public to understand that.”
“What does the boy say,” asked Porter; “you've had him up?”
“He says the mare was 'helped;' that she ran like a drunken man--swayed all over the course, and he couldn't pull her together at all.”
“You've guessed it,” answered the Steward, laconically.
“That's nonsense, sir; and he knows it. Why, the little mare is as sweet as a lamb, and as game a beast as ever looked through a bridle. Somebody got at the boy. I can prove by Dixon that Lucretia never had a grain of cocaine in her life--never even a bracer of whiskey--she doesn't need it; and as for the race, I hadn't a cent on Lauzanne.”
“He had a small bet; I didn't know that, even, until they were running.”
“Did you tell him not to back Lucretia, for he did Lauzanne?”
For answer Porter showed the Steward his race programme, on which was written the wager he had made on Lucretia, and the bookmaker's name.
“Ask Ullmer to bring his betting sheet,” the Steward said to an assistant.
On the sheet, opposite John Porter's badge number, was a bet, $10,000 to $4,000, in the Lucretia column.