Foremost among these first men of the turf was Tommy Dye,
scanning the quarter nags with a trained eye. As soon as the judge saw
him, he knew that General Jackson was not far away, for wherever the
general went, there also was to be found his faithful henchman, Tommy
Dye. It was he who arranged the cockfights in which the general
delighted, declaring a game cock to be the bravest thing alive. It was
he who was always trying to find for him a race-horse which could beat
Captain Haynie's Maria. This famous racer had beaten the general's
Decatur in that year's sweepstakes, and he had sworn by his strongest
oath that he would find a horse to beat her if there was one in the
world that could do it. But Tommy Dye and other eager, tireless agents
of the general had already searched far and wide. They had gone over all
the horse-raising states with a drag-net, they had sent as far as other
countries. And no horse which even promised to beat Maria had yet been
found, so that the general's defeat was still rankling bitterly, for it
was the bitterest that he had ever met or ever was to meet.
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