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THAT NEW ORLEANS PATH. Writing from New Orleans to Daily America, Charles E, Trevathan has this to say of a formidable factor in deciding the results of races at the Crescent City track : "It is more than ordinarily amusing to watch this game in the southern city. There are so many things about it that are unique and individual. You must know that the track received last summer a new top dressing of a soil that was supposed to be just the proper thing for wet weather. It is just the thing to make bricks without straw and to hold a horse about as hard as a strong-arm quarter rider of half a century ago could hold a dead one in a match. "The new soil is as full of spots as a smallpox patient and quite as unhealthy from a racing point of view. On the extreme outside there runs the famous path of which so much has baen heard since the present meeting opened. The possession of that path means ten, yes, twenty pounds the best of the race, and the scramble for it makes one think of the pictures in Harpers of the American soldiers rushing for the walls of Pekin. "All sorts of tactics are resorted to by the jockeys to get to the outside at the post, and the hardest task Starter Fitzgerald has is to keep the lads in positions which belong to them. "You will see a mmber three edging away out alongside a number nine. The lad who draws number one, next to the rail, is full of grief and vain endeavor. He is all in before the webbing flies. As it the eastern custom, the numbers on the blankets correspond to the positions of the horses at the post from the rail outward. "When the usual quota of rain has fallen and the track is particularly bad, the shrewd bettors simply fold the racing card in half and cut out of their calculations all horses whose names appear on the first half of the program. Only the bottom animals, with numbers running from six upward, are worth consideration. They have the outside positions at the post and will get away. The one to take the path will be in that lot, and the dope is framed to select that one. "Funny way of picking winners, but the fact that the majority of bookB doing business here are on the wrong side suggests that for the poor suffering player and payer the plan is not such a bad one. It is at least unique in racing history, this condition of playing to the outside horse, when all CONTINUED ON FOURTH PAGE. THAT NEW ORLEANS PATH. Continued from First Pago. along we have supposed the rail to be the only coveted position at the post. "Sheridan Clark does the handicapping here. What a job he has on his hands can be imagined. He naturally knows nothing of how the horses aro goiDg to bo placed, at the post. He must take performances only as his basis of weight adjustment. A hundred and ten pound horse oc the rail should be a hundred and twenty pound horse out on the path, and vice versa. Mr. Clark is barking at a knot any time he tries to make a proper weight adjustment on a field of New Orleans starters, and yet he has succeeded in getting some cracking finishes. .
