"All right . . . keep that line and walk up. . . . Bring up that 12 horse. . . . Back, four. . . . Step back, I tell you. . . . All right, Jimmy, bring him up. . . . The Salmon horse . . . Eddy, get that 12 horse by the bridle and pull him up. . . .All right, hold it . . . hold it ... spread out there. . . ."
The head starter at Churchill Down was talking to a glistening, shifting wall of thoroughbreds, which nudged and minced and hesitated at one end of a green lane of Kentucky turf under a gold-and-blue sky. With one word more he would send them away, down the green lane, around a white-fenced circle for a mile and a quarter. The 75,000 turbulent shadows packed along the stretch would roar for two minutes, and one more Kentucky Derby would be over. Two minutes and a few seconds — two minutes for which the jockeys had trained for months, for which the owners had planned for years, for which the horses had been groomed all their lives.
Gesticulating horsemen in the lobby of the Sellbach Hotel in Louisville had excitedly repeated the name of Bubbling Over for weeks, telling how this chestnut son of North Star III had smashed every fractional record up to a mile and an eighth when he won the Blue Grass stakes at Lexington by eight lengths. Eight lengths! That was the way Man-o'-War used to run.
E. R. Bradley of Kentucky had entered both Bagenbaggage and Bubbling Over and was telling his friends that they would place first and second, as his entries Behave Yourself and Black Servant did in 1921.
New Yorkers smiled indulgently at this declaration; they knew they had a horse worth a dozen Bubbling Overs; a horse that won the Hopeful and the Futurity last year; a small-hooved, huge-thewed bay colt by Sun Briar out of Cleopatra, who arrived in Louisville in a private car padded with silver canvas. They mentioned the morning that this horse had taken his first workout in the chill dews of seven o'clock— a morning when the trainer had stood at the rail, frantically signaling Watson the exercise boy, to slow down, while the split-second gentry compared watches, believing that they must have made some mistake in timing this incredible horse. It was W. R. Coe's Pompey, as sure a winner as a sporting man could ask.