LIFE WITH THE TROTTEES. 135 



any man parting witli a friend show more feeling tlian Mr. 

 Conklin did for liis liorse, and lie bid him that day what I 

 believe was his last farewell, as I think he never saw him 

 afterward. 



When the hour for the trot arrived, there was about ten 

 or fifteen thousand people on the ground. It had got noised 

 about that Mr. Whitehead had received orders from New 

 York not to start Rarus. Of course, there was great hub- 

 bub and excitement, the association coming to me about 

 the matter, but as I had sold the liorse with his engage- 

 ments, I referred them to Mr. Whitehead. The talk ended 

 by his refusing, point blank, under any consideration, to 

 trot the horse. The officers of the association thereu^Don 

 took action in the matter in a manner that caused, at that 

 time, a great deal of unfavorable comment, and which they 

 afterward, at their own motion, rescinded, thereby showing 

 that they considered themselves to have acted hastily, and 

 to have imposed an unwarranted and unjust punishment on 

 an innocent man — a punishment which was nothing less 

 than the expulsion of Mr. Conklin and Rarus. 



The people were wonderfully surprised when the presid- 

 ing judge rose in the stand and announced that Mr. R. B. 

 Conklin and the bay gelding Rarus were expelled from all 

 tracks forever. This seemed to me a strange and pathetic 

 ending of two such noted characters on the turf — the man, 

 one who had bred, raised, owned, and trotted the grandest 

 horse that, at that time, the public had ever seen, and that 

 probably had delighted more people with his feats of speed 

 than any other horse up to that time; a man who had scorned 

 to do anything unfair or unjust from the first to last of 

 his turf career; while the horse was one that had gone twice 

 across the continent, and had never failed to do his best. 

 For those two to be expelled at the end of such a career, 

 and that, too, by the ofiicers of the track over which the 

 horse had made what were then the three fastest consecutive 

 heats on record, was a sad, as well as strange, termination 

 to a course of honesty in both man and beast. 



