CHAPTER I

The Trainer


The Spring Meeting at Polefax was always Old Mat's day out. And it was
part of the accepted order of things that he should come to the Meeting
driving in his American buggy behind the horse with which later in the
day he meant to win the Hunters' Steeplechase.

There were very few sporting men who remembered the day when Mat had not
been a leading figure in the racing world. For sixty years he had been
training jumpers, and he looked as if he would continue to train them
till the end of time. Once it may be supposed he had been Young Mat, but
he had been Old Mat now as long as most could recall. In all these
years, indeed, he had changed very little. He trained his horses to-day
at Putnam's, the farm in the village of Cuckmere, over the green billow
of the Downs, just as he had done in the beginning; and he trained the
same kind of horses in the same kind of way, which was entirely
different from that of other trainers.

Mat rarely had a good horse in his stable, and never a bad one. He kept
his horses in old barns and farm-stables, turning them out on to the
chalk Downs in all seasons of the year with little shelter but the lee
of a haystack or an occasional shed.

"I don't keep my hosses in no 'ot-house," he would say. "A hoss wants a
heart, not a hot-water bottle. He'll get it on the chalk, let him be."