(3 of 3)
Jovial, grey-haired, leather-faced Major Tuttle was a Boston lawyer before he joined the Army in the War. His three high-school horses, Vast, Si Murray and Olympic, can each do 135 different tricks. Each trick has a technical name like the piaffé (trotting on one spot), the passage (highly accentuated trot with slight forward movement). His horses get neither beatings for punishment nor carrots for reward. The best that they can hope for is an occasional pat. The immobility of a good dressage rider is actually an illusion. He achieves his effects by shifts of weight so slight as to be imperceptible, pressure on the bit so gentle that Vast, Si Murray or Olympic can perform with silk threads instead of reins. The secret of dressage lies as much in the delicacy of the rider's hands as of the horse's mouth. Major Tuttle is an expert violinist. Olympic is now valued at $15,000. He cost $1. Like Vast and Si Murray, who cost $100 each, he is a thoroughbred race horse considered valueless by his former owner because he could not, or was too clever to, run fast.
Five years ago, horse racing was thrown into an uproar when a horse named Shem, who won a race at Havre de Grace at odds of 52-to-1, was proved to be not Shem but another faster horse named Aknahton, made up to resemble him by an expert "ringer" named Paddy Barrie (TIME, March 21, 1932). When the scandal was exposed, Paddy Barrie was deported and Aknahton was ruled off the track. What had become of the original Shem no one seemed to know.
When Shem disappeared, he was two years old. As a race horse he would now be worthless but last week Horse Show rumor said that Shem, now 7, a handsome chestnut gelding with two white legs, had been exhibited in a green hunter class under an assumed name, spirited away when recognized by a prospective buyer to whom he had been offered as a bargain for $3,000.