“Couldn’t we get old Jacob Benton; he’s the best trainer I’ve seen since I left home? Billy the Boy told us the other day he was out of a job, and was groom at Jonathan’s; had been sacked for getting drunk, and so on. He’ll be all the more likely to keep sober for a month.”

“The very man,” I said. “He can ride the weight, and train too. But we can’t have him here, surely!”

“No; but I can send the horse to him at Jonathan’s, and he can get him fit there as well as anywhere. There’s nearly a month yet; he’s pretty hard, and he’s been regularly exercised lately.”

Jack Benton was a wizened, dried-up old Yorkshireman. He’d been head man in a good racing stable, but drink had been the ruin of him—lost him his place, and sent him out here. He could be trusted to go right through with a job like ours, for all that. Like many men that drink hard, he was as sober as a judge between one burst and another. And once he took over a horse in training he touched nothing but water till the race was run and the horse back in his box. Then he most times went on an awful perisher—took a month to it, and was never sober day or night the whole time. When he’d spent all his money he’d crawl out of the township and get away into the country more dead than alive, and take the first job that offered. But he was fonder of training a good horse than anything else in the world; and if he’d got a regular flyer, and was treated liberal, he’d hardly allow himself to sleep or time to eat his meals till he’d got him near the mark. He could ride, too, and was an out-and-out judge of pace.

When we’d regular chalked it out about entering Rainbow for the Grand Turon Handicap, we sent Warrigal over to Billy the Boy, and got him to look up old Jacob. He agreed to take the old horse, the week before the races, and give him a last bit of French-polish if we’d keep him in steady work till then. From what he was told of the horse he expected he would carry any weight he was handicapped for and pull it off easy. He was to enter him in his own name, the proper time before the races. If he won he was to have ten per cent on winnings; if he lost, a ten-pound note would do him. He could ride the weight with some lead in his saddle, and he’d never wet his lips with grog till the race was over.