Somehow, someone should tell the duffer that all horse players die
broke, or that if he could make a living I'd be out of business.

Gimpy Gordon was one of Life's Unfortunates. If it were to rain gold
coins, Gimpy would be out wearing boxing gloves. His mental processes
meandered because of too much methyl. His unfortunate nickname did not
come from the old-fashioned reason that he walked with a limp, but from
the even more unfortunate reason that he _thought_ with a limp. In his
own unhealthy way he was--could we call it "Lucky" by any standard of
honesty? In this world full of highly developed psi talent, the Gimp
_could_ pick a pocket and get away with it because he often literally
could not remember where and how he'd acquired the wallet for longer
than a half minute. And it was a sort of general unwritten rule that any
citizen so utterly befogged as to permit his wealth to be lifted via
light fingers should lose it as a lesson!

But then it did indeed occur to me that maybe I could make use of the
Gimp.

I said, "What can I do, Gimpy?"

"Mr. Wilson," he pleaded, "is it true that you're workin' for
Barcelona?"

"Now, you know I can't answer that."

I could read his mind struggling with this concept. It was sort of like
trying to read a deck of Chinese Fortune Cards being shuffled before
they're placed in the machine at the Penny Arcade. As the drunk once
said after reading the Telephone Directory: "Not much plot, but _egad_!
What a cast of characters!" The gist of his mental maundering was a
childlike desire to have everything sewed up tight. He wanted to win, to
be told that he'd win, and to have all the rules altered ad hoc to
assure his winning.

Just where he'd picked up the inside dope that Barcelona favored Flying
Heels, Moonbeam, and Lady Grace in the Derby I could not dig out of him.
Just how Gimpy had made the association between this clambake and
me--good old Wally Wilson--I couldn't dig either. But here he was with
his--by now--sixty-five bucks carefully heisted, lifted, pinched and
fingered, and by the great Harry, Gimpy was not a-goin' to lay it across
the board on those three rejects from a claiming race unless he had a
cast-iron assurance that they'd come in across the board, one, two, and
three.

I said slowly, "_If_ I were even thinking of working for Mr. Barcelona,"
I told him, "I would be very careful never, never to mention it, you
know."

* * * * *