Explore "Victor Second" by Andrew Barton Paterson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We were training two horses for the Buckatowndown races -- an old grey warrior called Tricolor -- better known to the station boys as The Trickler -- and a mare for the hack race. Station horses don't get trained quite like Carbine; some days we had no time to give them gallops at all, so they had to gallop twice as far the next day to make up.
One day the boy we had looking after The Trickler fell in with a mob of sharps who told him we didn't know anything about training horses, and that what the horse really wanted was "a twicer" -- that is to say, a gallop twice round the course. So the boy gave him "a twicer" on his own responsibility. When we found out about it we gave the boy a twicer with the strap, and he left and took out a summons against us. But somehow or other we managed to get the old horse pretty fit, tried him against hacks of different descriptions, and persuaded ourselves that we had the biggest certainty ever known on a racecourse.