There had been a time years before when he had kept his own stud, and racing had been his hobby.  It had not held him for long.  He was not the man to pursue any one object for any length of time.  With characteristic volatility he had thrown up this amusement to follow others, but he had never wholly abandoned his interest in the stud which had once been his.

It was owned by one, Jake Bolton, a man of rugged exterior whose integrity had become a proverb on the Turf.  This man was Saltash’s erstwhile trainer, and a very curious bond existed between them.  Utterly unlike in every respect, the one as subtle as the other was simple, yet the two men were friends.  How it had come about neither of them quite knew.  When Saltash had been his employer, Jake Bolton had distrusted and despised him, but by some means this attitude of his had become very materially modified.  He greeted Saltash now with the hand of friendship which Saltash on his part was always ready to accept with a baffling smile that was not wholly without irony.  He was wont to say that any man could make an enemy of him, but no man could keep him as such.  Perhaps it was that very volatility of his which made anything of the nature of prolonged enmity an impossibility.  He possessed also that maddening sense of humour that laughs at deadly things.  A good many people had tried to take him seriously and had failed.  He was never serious.  As he used to say with his mocking laugh, life was difficult enough without complications of that sort.  All he ever asked of it was a certain mead of enjoyment.  It was utterly unreasonable to expect anything else.  Happiness!  What was it.  A bursting bubble, no more.  No lasting joy had ever come his way, and he was fain to believe that such a thing did not exist outside the covers of a book.

Jake Bolton could have told him otherwise, but he and Saltash never spoke of abstract things.  Saltash might have seen the deep content in the man’s eyes, but if he had, he would probably have scoffed at it.  In any case there was certainly no denying that he and Bolton had been cast in different moulds, and that which gave life-long satisfaction to the latter would have held the former for possibly but a very brief period.  As a woman friend who knew him well had once said of him, Charles Rex was too rapid a traveller to gather much upon the way.  For though keen for pleasure, he was too restless for its enjoyment when attained.  But even that friend had not fathomed all the possibilities of that strange personality.  Perhaps there was only one woman in the world who would ever do that.

It was a showery spring day, and the turf of the race-course shone with a fresh greenness.  Saltash strolled through the paddock to find Jake Bolton, whistling a careless air as he went.  Several stable-boys saluted him as he passed, and finally a man he knew, Sam Vickers, Bolton’s right-hand man, came up and accosted him.