The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-06-16
OLD MAN APPEARED CRAZY.
Bet His Last sS.OOO on Outside Horse
 and Won.

| fANoNANo tiAcb lllCNlNdO1J AdAl uHDil dllQ crush the victim of the pony playing
 habit" said one of the Chicago corre- spondents, the assumption seems to be that the young fellows only are the sufferers through the maintenance of the big horse racing games in this country. This is the most inexact as- sumption imaginable. The horse bug grips men at all stages of life and, from | observation of number of cases, am inclined to believe that when it takes hold of man whose youth is past, such man will go in for the shrivel- ling thing more desperately than the young fellow who takes an early start at it.
 | Take the case of old Pat Lacy, of Chicago Pat was an oid-fashioned
 rough-necked harp and he kept a mighty profitable 'longshoremen's grog- gerry on River street, Chicago. He had a no-good son who piked along with the
 horses and never worked, and one day
 Pat threw him into the outer air and told him to stay away.
 l sThe old man had no sooner done | this than he became sore on himself, and, urged on by the boys mother, he
 made up his mind to give the young fellow another show for his shiny mar I ble. He knew that his son could be found at the Washington park track, where the racing was then on-this was 1 five or six years ago-and so he diked himself out in his broadcloth clothes of | the centennial vintage and went out to | the track to hunt the boy up.
 He had never seen a race track in
 his life before-except the outside of one-but he had whole lot of dormant sporting blood, and the running thing made a hit with him from the go-off. l He found his son, made it up with him | and started in to making some in- ! quiries about the way the races were l run.
 l sThe boy knew it all, of course, and started in to put the old gentleman l wise. He trouted his dad onto 30 to l | shot in the third race, and the old man shredded a ten spot from his roll and l sent it along on the youngsters selec-
 tion. The horse won.
 | That came pretty near driving Pat back to the pick that he had dropped years before, that $500 win. He sent the money along for the remainder of
 the afternoon on his tough sons picks.
 and at the wind-up of the day he was nearly $1,oO0 to the good. He took the | boy home with him, and they spent half the night over the dope charts. l "Out to the track Pat and his son
 went together the next day, and Pat
 won tidily again. From that time on | Pats head barkeep began to gorge on l the big graft. The old man got too
 busy for the saloon business. He be- came thicker than thieves with the | youngster whom he had given the swift toss for fooling with the geegees, and spent hiss afternoons at the tracks l around Chicago.
 His beginners streak lasted for a | couple of months, and then all of a sud- l den he ran into a sandbar. The S12,000 that had simply drifted into his clothes during the two months began to drift | out again, and inside of a month he was not only all of the winnings to the worse, but he was drawing checks on his savings bank.
 "But there wasn't any quit in Pat 1 He had the instinct that the time to peel the coat and get into the shirt
 sleeves is when the roughrouse is under lIway, and although he was getting mighty sick of the uphill game, he trudged along
 He had $60OO in the savings bank, and that went. Then he was all in ,ex- cept the saloon. He tackled his wife on
 the proposition of putting her name
 alongside his to a mortgage of s8,000 on the saloon property, and she came so
 close to batting Pats head off that there wasn't any fun in it. But the sight of her mans head in bandages softened her, and after three days the
 mortgage was fixed up and her name
 on it. The $S,000 was paid over to Pat and he went out to the track with the l whole bundle.
 His head was still so swathed up that he looked like the flag end of a Swede riot, but there weren't any ban dages on his nerve. He was out at Washington park to get back the $6000 savings that he had lost, and he wasn't Tout there to do any piking, either.
 ''The horse Algol, a Chicago cracker Jack at that time, was carded for the first race, and Pat announced to his !son, who was with him, that the whole
 SS,000 wad was going on Algol, straight. The son tried to pick a fight with him so that they would both be arrested be- fore the race. The son couldn't see AL gol win, and he thought that the old
 mar was twirly, anyhow, for wanting
 to soak the mortgage price of one of the best water front saloons in Chicago on
 the outcome of one race. Maybe the
 son was right, but that's not the end of
 the story I'm taking. The son didn't
 get away with his attempt to mix his
 dad up in mussy scene and the old
 man plowed down to the ring with his
 $S000 and scattered it around on Algol
 at to l. a $1,OO0 bill at a clip with the
 different books
 When he got through that round AL gol was at to 5, and the holiday peo-
 pie, thinking that the plungers in the know had battered the price, went to the Algol horse for tens of thousands.
 They had no means of knowing that the
 cutting of the to 1 price had been
 caused by the old harp in the broad
 cloth clothes and the bandaged head, who was due to hustle for job on the drainage canal if Algol didn't happen to feel like running that afternoon. The