"I walked around among the crowd with my hands in my pockets, wondering a good deal over the dope talk of the ducks that knew all about the horses and their preferred weights, distances, riders, and so on; it was all Greek to me then. Finally I was shouldered and jostled into the betting ring. It wasn’t long before I began to rubberneck at the prices laid against the horses on the bookies’ blackboards. Although I didn’t know anything about the nags then, I found out afterward, when I had made a study of the game and got a little next to it, that this race I made my first bet on was composed of a cheap mess of fourteen selling platers. They were at all kinds of prices, from 4 to 5 on to 100 to 1 against. The latter price was laid about three of ’em. I didn’t exactly understand what the 100 to 1 meant, and so I asked a fellow standing near by to explain it. He looked me over out of the slants of his lamps, thinking, probably, that I was stringing him. When he saw that I was a green one he told me that the 100 to 1 meant that if a 100 to 1 shot won that I had put a dollar on I’d be $100 ahead of the game. This looked pretty good to me. I didn’t know anything about horse form or horse quality then, and I thought that one of ’em had just as much chance as another to win. So I picked out the 100 to 1 shot whose name I liked best and elbowed my way up to a booky’s stand to put a dollar down on it, holding my $20 bill tightly gripped in my hand. I passed the twenty up to the bookmaker—he went broke, and has been a dead ’un for a good many years now—and said:
"’Give me a dollar’s worth of that fourth horse from the top—that one with the 100 to 1 chalked before his name.’
"The booky looked down at me contemptuously, without accepting the twenty I proffered him, and said:
"Well, this made me feel pretty cheap, especially as all of the ducks back of me, waiting to pass up their fifties and hundreds gave me the laugh. I didn’t like to be shown up in that public way. I was just as sore at that time about being made to look like thirty cents as I am to-day. So I did a bit of lightning thinking. ’Twenty’s a big bunch to me,’ I thought, ’and I’ve had to hop out of bed at half past 3 in the morning to go to meat market a good many times to get it together; but I’ll be hanged if I’m going to let this fellow get away with his idea of making me look small, even if I haven’t got a show on earth.’ So I passed the bill up to him again, saying: