-"

"Can it, Joseph. We're both big boys now and we both know what the score
is. You know and I know that the first time I or one of my boys takes a
bet on any one of the three turtles you like, the guy who laid the bet
is going to slip the word to one of your outside men. And you're going
to leap to the strange conclusion that if Wally Wilson is accepting bets
against his own fix, he must know something exceedingly interesting."

[Illustration]

"Now, who's been saying anything about a fix, Wally?"

"The people," I thought bluntly, "who have most recently been associated
with your clever kind of operator."

"That isn't very nice, Wally."

If it had been a telephone conversation, I'd have slammed the telephone
on him. The mealymouthed louse and his hypocritical gab was making me
mad--and I knew that he was making me mad simply to make me lose control
of my blanket. I couldn't stop it, so I let my anger out by thinking:

"You think you are clever because you're slipping through sly little
loopholes, Joseph. I'm going to show you how neat it is to get
everything I want including your grudging admission of defeat by the
process of making use of the laws and rules that work in my favor."

"You're a wise guy," he hurled back at me.

"I'm real clever, Barcelona. And I'm big enough to face you, even
though Phil Howland, The Greek, and Chicago Charlie make like cold clams
at the mention of your name."

"Why, you punk--"

"Go away, Barcelona. Go away before I make up my mind to make you eat
it."

I turned to Nora Taylor and regarded her charms and attractions both
physical and mental with open and glowing admiration. It had the
precalculated result and it wouldn't have been a whit different if I'd
filed a declaration of intent and forced her to read it first.

It even satisfied my ambient curiosity about what a telepathed grinding
of the teeth in frustrated anger would transmit as. And when it managed
to occur to an unemployed thought-center of my brain that the lines of
battle were soft and sweetly curved indeed, Joseph Barcelona couldn't
stand it any more. He just gave a mental sigh and signaled for the
noisemakers to shut him off from contact.

* * * * *

Derby Day, the First Saturday in May, dawned warm and clear with a fast,
dry track forecast for post time. The doorbell woke me up and I dredged
my apartment to identify Nora fiddling in my two-bit kitchen with ham
and eggs.