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was exercising three-year-olds, and one gray morning when he turned out of the loft where he slept, the foreman shouted:
"Hurry up, you Tim, an' git yer breakfast."
The boy wondered and obeyed. He gulped down the last of his oatmeal, shot out of the training kitchen, and ran up to the stables, where a negro groom was holding a big bay horse, about which Faulkner himself was busily working. The trainer arose as the boy ran up.
"Up you go, kid," he said and tossed Tim into the saddle.
And Tim knew that he was to exercise Lear! And everybody knew that the Holland stable was pointing Lear for the Brooklyn Handicap! It was a proud moment for Tim. But his honors didn't sit too heavily on his small shoulders, for Faulkner was a hard task-master.
"Jog him to the mile post and send him the last half in .55 an' keep yer eye on the flag," the trainer would order.
Then the boy would canter away through the gray light, and the trainer, handkerchief in one hand and stop-watch in the other, would mount the fence. If the clock said .57 for that last half mile, or anything between that and .55, there was a slap on the back and a "Good kid," for Tim, but woe to him if the clicking hand cut it down to .53.
Mistakes he made, and many of them, but they grew fewer and fewer. Good hands he had and an intuitive knowledge of the temper of a horse. A good seat they had taught him at The Vale. And gradually, little by little and bit by bit, he came to be what only one jockey in fifty ever grows into--an unerring judge of pace.
Just what it is that tells a boy whether the muscles of steel that he bestrides are shooting him rhythmically over a furlong of dull brown earth or black and slimy mud in .12-1/2 or .13-1/4, some person may perhaps be able to tell, but certain it is that no person ever has told it. Long after Tim had learned the secret as few boys have ever known it, I asked him.
"Why," said he, "yew know your hoss, an' after thet, why, yew jest feel it."
It was not until the autumn meeting at Gravesend that Tim first wore the colors. It was in an overnight selling race for two-year-olds, for which Faulkner had in despair named Gracious.
Gracious was a merry little short-bodied filly, who was bred as well as any of the Holland lot, but who hadn't done well. Out of six starts she had never shown anything, and Faulkner had determined to start her once more and then weed her out. The weight, eighty-seven pounds, was so light that the stable jockey couldn't make it. Then Faulkner remembered the Colonel's words: "Give him a chance, if he makes good."
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