at this. Barnyard Gate (M) 105* ch.g.3, by Barnaby—Gates Ajar, by Frangi-Pangi. Dec. 5, TrP, 6f, 1:13 sy, 17, 111* 11, 15, 13, 89 Str’gf’l’wG AlwM, Wo’b’g’n 119, C’r’l’ss H’s’y 112, Tr’c’le M’ffn 114. You see? And now take a look at this workout. Fly 2 Aqu 1/2ft: 48 3/5 bg. A morning-glory and a dog, and if you ever put ten cents on his nose even in a two thousand claimer you got rocks in your head. He’s a front runner and a choker and even Arcaro couldn’t rate him off the pace and he always dies at the eighth pole.”
They stopped me then, and there was hell to pay. They just wouldn’t believe I was reading it. I told ‘em it was all right there, as plain as the nose on their face, that Barnyard Gate was a three-year-old chestnut gelding and had never won a race, and that he was by Barnaby out of Gates Ajar, by Frangi-Pangi, and that the last time he’d run he’d gone off at about 17-to-1 in a six-furlong Maiden Allowance at Tropical Park on December 5th with George Stringfellow up and carrying 111 pounds with the apprentice allowance claimed. The track was sloppy and the winner’s time was 1 minute and 13 seconds, and Barnyard Gate led at the start, at the half, and going into the stretch, and then had folded and come in eighth by nine lengths, and that the first three horses had been Woebegone, Careless Hussy, and Treacle Muffin. I told ‘em they was the ones didn’t know how to read, and they said, “Well I never!
That did it. They said a boy that the only thing he could read was the racing form was a disgrace to the American way of life and they was going to court and have me taken away from Pop and put in a Home. I didn’t like it, of course, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it and I just had to wait for Pop to get out of the draft.
Well, they kept me at the Home for about a month, and they was real nice to me. They even let me have the Treasure Island book to read, and I got so worked up about it I couldn’t lay it down. It was slow going at first, what with this guy’s long-winded way of padding the words out, but after a while I worked out a kind of system that I’d squint my eyes and sort of weed out all the extra letters and I did a little better. I was half-way through it and getting more excited all the time when Pop came back from the draft. There was a sort of meeting, with some of the Welfare ladies and the superintendent of the Home and some strange men I didn’t know, and they was all going at it hot and heavy, with Pop telling ‘em how he was a turf investment counselor by trade and there wasn’t anything wrong with that, and who did they think they was, trying to take his boy away from him?
I was trying to sneak a few lines of the book, just in case they took it away from me, and I says to Pop, “Do you know about this Long John Silver?”
“I never heard of him,” he says. “Probably some dog running in claimers.”
Well, they jumped all over him then, and that’s when he remembered about Uncle Sagamore’s farm. We was going down there, he said; there wasn’t nothing like wholesome farm life for a boy. And there’s one thing about Pop, he’s a talker. When he’s selling the sheets he can talk the ear off a sucker. Clients, Pop calls ‘em. I could see him beginning to get hold of this idea about Uncle Sagamore’s farm, and he really started to warm up.
“Why,” he says, “just think of all our great men that got their start on a farm, men like Lincoln and General Thomas E. Lee and Grover Whalen and William Wadsworth Hawthorne and Addie Arcaro. Why, just think what it’ll be like, with ducks to feed and eggs to gather, and watermelons, and cows to milk, and horses to ride—” Pop stopped there and kind of coughed a little and backed up.
“No. Come to think of it, there ain’t a horse on the place. I remember now my brother Sagamore always said he wouldn’t have one around if you give it to him. He’s got mules