Death of Dice

A year ago Harry Payne Whitney, generous turfman, sold four horses for a song, because Ogden Mills and Ogden Mills' sister (Mrs. Henry C. Phipps) were his good friends, because he wished them luck with their new Wheatley Stables. One of the four yearlings, a slender bay colt with a reckless eye, bore the name of Dice.

Last week champion two-year-old Dice, his long narrow legs playing up and down like fire, stepped out of a Saratoga stable where he was being groomed for the morrow's Saratoga Special. Gaily he loped a practice mile, sniffed the cool air that smelled a little of horses and saddles, pranced off the track. A stable man leading him rubbed the horse's nose, then looked down at his hand quickly. It was covered with blood. Dice, suddenly tired, stood stiffly while bright red drops made a pattern on the damp turf. Four hours later, blood still pouring out of his nose from a lung hemorrhage, Dice died.

Touts, jockeys, trainers with the universal sentimentality of sporting characters, enjoy the supposition that race horses possess retentive memories. They would prefer to suppose that Dice, as he watched blood oozing out of his nostrils, preserved in his mind a blurred panorama of fields and stables, race tracks and boxcars. Outlined still in the confusion of the past would be the five spring afternoons of his five races; victories all, in which he won $43,000 for owners who had bought him for less than a quarter of that amount, valued him at more than twice that amount. There would be the Overnight at Jamaica, a debut won as a whippet would win from airdales, the Keene Memorial and the Juvenile Stakes at Belmont, two races at Aqueduct--five golden afternoons, all full of sunshine and moving figures, the smell of grass and leather, the sound of cheers and hurrying hoofs.