"I know. It's like having some one whisper secrets in your ear, at
first, isn't it? But you remember the Lorrimer, eh? That was a race!"

The sounder stopped chattering, and by an alternation in her eyes he
knew that up to that moment she had been giving two-thirds of her
attention to the voice of the wire and the other fraction to him; but
now she centered upon him, and he wanted to talk. As if, mysteriously,
he could share some of the burden of his unrest with the girl. Most of
all he wished to talk because this office had lifted him back to the old
days of "lightning jerking," when he worked for a weekly pay-check. The
same nervous eagerness which had been his in that time was now in this
girl, and he responded to it like a call of blood to blood.

"A couple of wise ones took me out to Aqueduct that day: I had all that
was coming to me for a month in my pocket, and I kept saying to myself:
'They think I'll fall for this game and drop my wad; here's where I fool
'em!'"

He chuckled as he remembered.

"Go on," said the girl. "You make me feel as if I were about to make a
clean-up!"

"Really interested?"

She fixed an eager glance on him, as though she were judging how far she
might let herself go. Suddenly she leaned closer to Connor.

"Interested? I've been taking the world off the wire for six years--and
you've been where things happen."

"That's the way I felt at Aqueduct when I saw the ponies parade past the
grand stand the first time," he nodded. "They came dancing on the bitt,
and even I could see that they weren't made for use; legs that never
pulled a wagon, and backs that couldn't weight. Just toys; speed
machines; all heart and fire and springy muscles. It made my pulse jump
to the fever point to watch them light-foot it along the rail with the
groom in front on a clod of a horse. I felt that I'd lived the way that
horse walked--downheaded, and I decided to change."

He stopped short and locked his stubby fingers together, frowning at her
so that the lines beside his mouth deepened.

"I seem to be telling you the story of my life," he said. Then he saw
that she was studying him, not with idle curiosity, but rather as one
turns the pages of an absorbing book, never knowing what the next moment
will reveal or where the characters will be taken.

"You want to talk; I want to hear you," she said gravely. "Go ahead.
Besides--I don't chatter afterward. They paraded past the grand stand,
then what?"