The crowd was not struck by the performance, and the fat man said:
"No pace!" but surreptitiously made two strokes (to indicate Number Two)
on the cuff of his shirt.

"Number Eleven, Spite!" This was a leggy, weedy chestnut, half-racehorse,
half-nondescript, ridden by a terrified amateur, who went at the fence
with a white, set face. The horse raced up to the fence, and stopped dead,
amid the jeers of the crowd. The rider let daylight into him
with his spurs, and rushed him at it again. This time he got over.

Round he went, clouting some fences with his front legs,
others with his hind legs. The crowd jeered, but the fat man,
from a sheer spirit of opposition, said: "That would be a good horse
if he was rode better." And the squatter remarked: "Yes,
he belongs to a young feller just near me. I've seen him jump splendidly
out in the bush, over brush fences."

The little dark man said nothing, but made a note in his book.

"Number Twelve, Gaslight!" "Now, you'll see a horse," said the fat man.
"I've judged this 'orse in twenty different shows, and gave him first prize
every time!"

Gaslight turned out to be a fiddle-headed, heavy-shouldered brute,
whose long experience of jumping in shows where they give points for pace
-- as if the affair was a steeplechase -- had taught him
to get the business over as quickly as he could. He went thundering
round the ring, pulling double, and standing off his fences in a style
that would infallibly bring him to grief if following hounds across roads
or through broken timber.