bunch down. I was a figure at the tracks in those days. I went into racing
on my customary generous scale. I liked horses, just as I liked everything
that belonged out under the big sky; also I liked the advertising my string
of thoroughbreds gave me. I was rich enough to be beyond the stage at which
a man excites suspicion by frequenting race-tracks and gambling-houses; I
was at the height where prodigalities begin to be taken as evidences of
abounding superfluity, not of a dangerous profligacy. Jim Harkaway, who
failed at playing the same game I played and won, said to me with a sneer
one day: "You certainly do know how to get a dollar's worth of notoriety
out of a dollar's worth of advertising."

"If I only knew that, Jim," said I, "I'd have been long ago where you're
bound for. The trick is to get it back ten for one. The more _you_
advertise yourself, the more suspicious of you people become. The more
money I 'throw away' in advertising, the more convinced people are that I
can afford to do it."

But, as I was about to say, in one of the boxes I spied my shy friend,
Sammy. He was looking better than I had ever seen him. Less heavy-eyed,
less pallid and pasty, less like a man who had been shirking bed and
keeping up on cocktails and cold baths. He was at the rear of the box,
talking with a lady and a gentleman. As soon as I saw that lady, I knew
what it was that had been hiding at the bottom of my mind and rankling
there.

Luckily I was alone; ever since that lunch I had been cutting loose from
the old crowd--from all its women, and from all its men except two or three
real friends who were good fellows straight through, in spite of their
having made the mistake of crossing the dead line between amateur "sport"
and professional. I leaned over and tapped Sammy on the shoulder.