view raw text
MARS CASSIDY TELLS ONE Famous Starter Relates Story of Unexpected Thanksgiving Dinner — Indian Helps Out. Starter Mars C.assidy can tell as many interesting tales of the turf as any man. nor does he hesitate at making himself the butt of some of his best jokes. And apropos to Thanksgiving and turkey, here is one Cassidy recently narrated to a bunch of the boys : "Thirty-two years ago. when some of the foremost trainers of today were racing at Iron Hill and some other small tracks." he said. "These tracks were not under the sanction of the governing turf body of the east and we w«re called outlaws and barred from the big New York tracks. I had a small stable and it had been tough picking for several weeks. I had an old darkey, who was foreman of the stable and also cook for the layout. His first assistant was an Indian that had been with me for a long time. I was so broke I hadnt paid any of my stable help for weeks, but they stuck on, waiting for the luck to turn. "On the day before Thanksgiving old Sam. the foreman and cook, asked if we were going to have turkey and I told him I didnt have one dollar to rub against another and that the grocer and butcher had shut down on the charge account It didnt seem to worry the old man much for he told me to go ahead and invite the gang around to dinner next evening and that it would be there for them. I didnt know how he was going to manage it, and knew it wouldnt do any good to be asking fool questions, so I went ahead and invited the bunch. "There was still one place where I had plenty of credit and that was a wet goods emporium in Washington, so I sent In an order for everying we needed in that line. "After we got through with the races we could smell that dinner by the time we got within a quarter of a mile of the kitchen. When ten of us put out feet under that old pine table, there was a turkey at one end that was as big as one of those prize gobblers that go to the White House every Thanksgiving. At the other end was a fine, fat shoat with a red apple in his mouth and scattered along between the turkey and the shoat there were all the trimmings that anybody would want with a dinner. "We had all we wanted to eat for that time and I never asked any foolish questions about where it came from. The next day. however, a pair of deputy sheriffs were snooping around the stables and said something about a farmer nearby having lost a couple of turkeys and two or three suckling pigs. They didnt find anything and then I asked old Sam about it Then the old man had to grin. " Why, Mr. Mars," he said, that Indian can outsteal any nigger in the world. He jest clim right on to the top of that big old tree, past half a dozen other turkeys roostin on the lower limbs to git that big old gobbler and narry a one of them ever as much as made a flutter. Dont worry about them old sheriffs, dey would hafter dig down five feet under the groun to find a feather or a bone. " — Pilot, in Sydney Leferee.
