Ikey Aaronsohnn, the third of the famous Three, walked between the other two, as befitted the brain and purse of the concern.  He was a typical Levantine, Semitic, even Simian, small-featured, and dark.  In his youth he must have been pretty, and there was still a certain charm about him.  He had qualities, inherent and super-imposed, entirely lacking to his two colleagues.  A man of education and some natural refinement, he had a delicious sense of humour which helped him to an enjoyment of life and such a genial appreciation of his own malpractices and those of others as to make him the best of company and far the most popular of the Three J’s.

If Chukkers was little more than an animal-riding animal, and Jaggers an artistic fraud, Ikey was a rascal of a highly differentiated and engaging type.  A man of admirable tenacity he had clung for twenty-five years to the ideal which Chukkers’s discovery of Mocassin two years since had brought within his grasp.

The disqualification of the mare at Liverpool last year after the great race had served only to whet his appetite and kindle his faith.

A quarter of a century before he had set himself to find the horse that would beat the English thoroughbred at Aintree.  And in Mocassin he had at last achieved his aim.

* * * * *

If a cloud of romance hung about the mare, veiling in part her past, some points at least stood out clear.

It was known that her dam was a Virginian mare of the stately kind which of late years has filled the eye in the sale-ring at Newmarket and held its own between the flags.  And piquancy was added by the fact, recorded in the Kentucky stud-book, that the dam traced her origin direct to Iroquois who in the Derby of 1881 had lowered the English colours to the dust.

Again there was no doubt that the mare had been born in a yellow-pine shack in the Cumberlands, on an old homestead—­made familiar to millions in both continents by the picture papers—­known as Blue Mounds, and owned by a Quaker farmer who was himself the great-grandson of a pioneer Friend, who in the last years of the eighteenth century had crossed the mountains with his family and flocks, like Abraham of old, and had won for himself this clearing from the primeval forest, driving farther west its ancient denizens.

So much, not even the arrogant English dared to dispute.

But the rest was mystery.  It was said that Jaggers himself did not know who was Mocassin’s sire; and that Ikey and Chukkers, the only two who did, were so close that they never let on even to each other.  True the English, with characteristic bluff, when they discovered that they had found their mistress in the mare, took it for granted that her sire was an imported English horse and even named him.  But Ikey and Chukkers both denied the importation with emphasis.