e horse has won, and the man in the smoking-room of
the Post Club knows it before the judge has given his decision."

"Impossible," Fielden exclaimed.

"I know it seems impossible, and twenty years ago you would have said
the telephone was impossible, and people would have scouted the idea of
wireless telegraphy. But they both came, like the phonograph and other
wonders."

"Oh, that's all very well," Fielden smiled. "But you are not going to
ask me to believe that this thing is done by thought-reading or anything
of that sort? You won't tell me that this famous member of the Post Club
is a clairvoyant who sees the race finished while it is being run?
Because, if that were the case, the favoured person would have no need
of a syndicate to help him; he would do it all by himself."

"I am not suggesting anything of the kind," Phillips said. "There's
nothing occult about the business. The thing is capable of explanation,
and I am in a position to give it, except for the finishing touches,
which make this dodge almost a work of genius. I know who is at the
bottom of it, I know who is working it, and I know how the information
is conveyed to within a few feet of the tape machines in the Post Club.
But how that information is filtered to the man inside is the thing that
beats me at present. But so much I have found out. In the very next
office to the smoking-room of the Post Club is a firm who call
themselves Jolly & Co. Now Jolly & Co. only took their office last
September or October. There is not the slightest sign of any business
being done there, because I have been in the office myself. Taken in
conjunction with what I have told you, it must strike you as an odd
thing that this mysterious Jolly & Co. shut up the office and went
abroad last year after the flat-racing was over. Probably Jolly & Co.
went off to make a bit in the Riviera, or Egypt, or some other
fashionable resort where fools and money congregate. It is an odd thing
that during the January meeting at Mirst Park Jolly & Co. should turn up
again and resume operations in Covent Garden. Now I called to see Mr.
Jolly. He had left his office, but I guessed that before I called, or I
shouldn't have ventured. The first thing I saw was a telephone with an
unusually long flex to it. I don't quite understand why this flex is so
long, but I can make a shrewd guess. It cost me an hour or two and
plenty of hard thinking to get farther in my investigations, but I found