Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [52]
Across the yard Chick was watching the horsebox drive away, his usual scowl in place. Morrison frowned irritably. The boy was a pest, he thought. Always grousing, always impertinent, always trying to scrounge up more money. Morrison didn’t believe in boys having life made too easy: a little hardship was good for the soul. Where Morrison and Chick radically differed was the point at which each thought hardship began.
Chick spotted the frown and watched Morrison fearfully, his guilt pressing on him like a rock. He couldn’t know, he thought frantically. He couldn’t even suspect there was anything wrong with the horse or he wouldn’t have let him go off to the races. The horse had looked all right, too. Absolutely his normal self. Perhaps there had been nothing wrong with the carrot… Perhaps it had been the wrong carrot, even… Chick glanced around uneasily and knew very well he was fooling himself. The horse might look all right but he wasn’t.
Arthur Morrison saddled up his horse at the races, and Chick watched him from ten nervous paces away, trying to hide in the eager crowd that pushed forward for a close view of the favourite. There was a larger admiring crowd outside the chestnut’s saddling stall than for any of the other seven runners, and the bookmakers had shortened their odds. Behind Morrison’s concentrated expression an itch of worry was growing insistent. He pulled the girth tight and adjusted the buckles automatically, acknowledging to himself that his former satisfaction had changed to anxiety. The horse was not himself. There were no lively stamping feet, no playful nips from the teeth, no response to the crowd; this was a horse that usually played to the public like a film star. He couldn’t be feeling well, and if he wasn’t feeling well he wouldn’t win. Morrison tightened his mouth. If the horse were not well enough to win, he would prefer him not to run at all. To be beaten at odds-on would be a disgrace. A defeat on too large a scale. A loss of face. Particularly as Morrison’s own eldest son Toddy was to be the jockey. The newspapers would tear them both to pieces.
Morrison came to a decision and sent for the vet.
The rules of jump racing in England stated quite clearly that if a horse had been declared a runner in a race, only the say-so of a veterinary surgeon was sufficient grounds for withdrawing him during the last three-quarters of an hour before post time. The Cheltenham racecourse veterinary surgeon came and looked at the chestnut and, after consulting with Morrison, led it off to a more private stall and took its temperature.
‘His temperature’s normal,’ the vet assured Morrison.
‘I don’t like the look of him.’
‘I can’t find anything wrong.’
‘He’s not well,’ Morrison insisted.
The vet pursed his lips and shook his head. There was nothing obviously wrong with the horse, and he knew he would be in trouble himself if he allowed Morrison to withdraw so hot a favourite on such slender grounds. Not only that, this was the third application for withdrawal he’d had to consider that afternoon. He had refused both the others, and the chestnut was certainly in no worse a state.
‘He’ll have to run,’ the vet said positively, making up his mind.
Morrison was furious and went raging off to find a steward, who came and looked at the chestnut and listened to the vet and confirmed that the horse would have to run whether Morrison liked it or not. Unless, that was, Morrison cared to involve the horse’s absent owner in paying a heavy fine?
With a face of granite Morrison resaddled the chestnut, and a stable-lad led him out into the parade ring, where most of the waiting public cheered and a few wiser ones looked closely and