The Leger this year was to be run on the fourteenth of September, and while Lord Silverbridge was amusing himself with the dear at Crummie-Toddie and at Killancodlem with the more easily pursued young ladies, the indefatigable Major was hard at work in the stables. This came a little hard on him. There was the cub-hunting to be looked after, which made his presence at Runnymede necessary, and then that 'pig-headed fellow, Silverbridge', would not have the horse trained anywhere but at Newmarket. How was he to be in two places at once? Yet he was in two places, almost at once, cub-hunting in the morning at Egham and Bagshot, and sitting on the same evening at the stable-door at Newmarket, with his eyes fixed upon Prime Minister.
Gradually had he and Captain Green come to understand each other, and though they did at last understand each other, Tifto would talk as though there were no such correct intelligence;--when for instance he would abuse Lord Silverbridge for being pig-headed. On such occasions the Captain's remark would generally be short.
'That be blowed!' he would say, implying that that state of things between the two partners in which such complaints might be natural, had now been brought to an end. But on one occasion, about a week before the race, he spoke out a little plainer.
'What's the use of going on with all that, before me? It's settled what you've got to do.'
'I don't know that anything is settled,' said the Major.
'Ain't it? I thought it was. if it aren't you'll find yourself in the wrong box. You've as straight a tip as a man need wish for, but if you back out you'll come to grief. Your money's all on the other way already.'
On the Friday before the race Silverbridge dined with Tifto at the Beargarden. On the next morning they went down to Newmarket to see the horse get a gallop, and came back the same evening. During all this time, Tifto was more than ordinarily pleasant to his patron.
The horse and the certainty of the horse's success were the only subjects mooted. 'It isn't what I say,' repeated Tifto, 'but look at the betting. You can't get five to four against him. They tell me that if you want to do anything on the Sunday the pull will be the other way.'
'I stand to lose twenty thousand pounds already,' said Silverbridge, almost frightened by the amount.
'But how much are you to win?' said Tifto. 'I suppose you could sell your bets for five thousand pounds down.'
'I wish I knew how to do it,' said Silverbridge. But this was an arrangement, which, if made just now, would not suit the Major's views.
They went to Newmarket, and there they met Captain Green. 'Tifto,' said the young lord, 'I won't have that fellow with us when that horse is galloping.'
'There isn't an honester man, or a man who understands a horse's pace better in all England,' said Tifto.
'I won't have him standing alongside of me on the Heath,' said his lordship.
'I don't know how I'm to help it.'
'If he's there I'll send the horse in;--that's all.' Then Tifto found it best to say a few words to Captain Green. But the Captain also said a few words to himself. 'D- young fool; he don't know what he's dropping into.' Which assertion, if you lay aside the unnecessary expletive, was true to the letter. Lord Silverbridge was a young fool, and did not at all know into what a mess he was being dropped by the united experience, perspicuity, and energy of the man whose company on the Heath he had declined.
The horse was quite a 'picture to look at. Mr Pook the trainer assured his Lordship that for health and condition he had never seen anything better. 'Stout all over,' said Mr Pook, 'and not an ounce of what you may call flesh. And bright! just feel his coat, my Lord! That's 'ealth,--that is; not dressing, nor yet macassar!'
And then there were various evidences produced of his pace,--how he had beaten that horse, giving him two pounds, how he had been beated by that, but only a mile course; the Leger distance was just the thing for Prime Minister; how by a lucky chance that marvellous quick rat of a thing that had won the Derby had not been entered for the autumn race; how Coalheaver was known to have bad feet. 'He's a stout 'orse, no doubt,--is the 'Eaver,' said Mr Pook, 'and that's why the betting-men have stuck to him. But he'll be nowhere on Wednesday. They're beginning to see it now, my Lord.
I wish they wasn't so sharp-sighted.'
In the course of the day, however, they met a gentleman who was of a different opinion. He said loudly that he looked on the Heaver as the best three-year-old in England. Of course as matters stood he wasn't going to back the Heaver with even money;--but he'd take twenty-five to thirty in hundreds between the two. All this ended in the bet being accepted and duly booked by Lord Silverbridge.
And in this way Silverbridge added two thousand four hundred pounds to his responsibilities.
But there was worse than this coming. On the Sunday afternoon he went down to Doncaster, of course in the company with the Major.
He was alive to the necessity of ridding himself of the Major; but it had been acknowledged that the duty could not be performed till after this race had been run. As he sat opposite to his friend on their journey to Doncaster, he thought of this in the train. It should be done immediately on their return to London after the race. But the horse, his Prime Minister, was by this time so dear to him that he intended if possible to keep possession of the animal.
