ad no witnesses.
I think he's comin' here to-night to ask me to pay him to do some dirty
job, an' I won't do it, see?" and he winked at Faust. "He's a bad boy,"
said the Bookmaker, in a tone of mock condemnation.

"There he is now," declared Langdon. "I hear a step on the gravel.
Quick, slip into the room; he'll be peepin' through the windows; he's
like a fox."

There was a knock at the door. When Langdon opened it Shandy shuffled
into the room with a peculiar little rocking-horse sort of gait, just
like the trot of a skunk. His whole appearance somehow suggested this
despised animal.

"Have you heard anything from the Porter stable?" Langdon asked, when
the boy had taken a seat.

"The little mare's well," the boy answered, laconically.

"That's bad luck for us, Shandy. We'll be poorer by the matter of a few
thousand if they win the Derby."

"Who's we?" questioned Shandy, with saucy directness.

"The whole stable. A man has played The Dutchman to win a hundred
thousand, an' he's goin' to give the boys, one or two of them, five
hundred if it comes off."

The small imp's weak, red-lidded eyes took on a hungry, famished look.
"What're you givin' us is that straight goods?" he demanded, doubtingly.

Langdon didn't answer the question direct; he said: "My man's afraid
somebody'll get at The Dutchman. There's a lot of horse sickness about,
an' if anyone was to take some of the poison from a sick horse's nose
and put it in The Dutchman's nostrils at night, why he'd never start in
the Derby, I reckon."

A look of deep cunning crept into the boy's thin freckled face; his eyes
contracted and blinked nervously.

"What th' 'ell's the difference? If the Porter mare starts Redpath
thinks he's got a lead-pipe cinch."

"You'd lose your five hundred; that's the difference," retorted Langdon.

"An' if she doesn't start, an' our horse wins, I get five hundred? Is
that dead to rights?"

"If The Dutchan wins you get the money," replied the Trainer,
circumspectly. "You mustn't come to me, Shandy, with no game about
takin' the horse sickness from, our two-year-old an' fixin' Porter's
mare, 'cause I can't stand for that, see?"

The boy would have interrupted, but Langdon motioned him to keep silent,
and proceeded:

"You see, if it leaked out an' we'd won a lot of money over The
Dutchman, damn fools would say that I'd been at the bottom of it; an'
if they had me up in front of the Stewards I couldn't swear that I'd had
not