W. A. Fraser: (1859–1933) married (1889) Jessie Maud Barber. A Canadian novelist and inventor, he was born in Nova Scotia of Scots parents and educated at Westchester. He worked as a mining engineer in India, Burma, and Canada, before taking to writing and broadcasting animal stories. Thoroughbreds: A Sporting Novel (1903) is concerned with horse-racing in America. The plot hinges on a sinister banker trying to ruin the honest trainer by drugging horses with cocaine; the climax is when the trainer's lovely daughter disguises herself as a jockey in order to win the crucial race. Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries (1900) is a series of derivative animal stories (after Kipling) about Mooswa the Moose, protector of the Boy who is the son of the Hudson's Bay Company's factor in a remote area of Canada.
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By an inconsistent twist of fate he was known as Honest John. His father before him had raced in old Kentucky to considerable purpose, and with the full vigor of a man who races for sport; and so to the son John, in consequence, had come little beyond a not-to-be-eradicated love of thoroughbreds. To race squarely, honestly, and to the glory of high-couraged horses was to him as much a matter of religion as the consistent guardianship of parish morals was to the Reverend George Dolman. Therefore, two men of strong beliefs were set on opposite sides of the fence.
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