"_Thank_ you, suh!" chuckled Shanghai, trying hard to appear surprised. "Thank you! This sutny goin' _com_bine business with pleasuah!"
"Get away with you!" scolded Old Man Curry.
Now, nearly every one knows that the simon-pure feed-box information, the low-down and the dead-level tip, may be picked up behind any barn where hostlers, exercise boys, and apprentice jockeys congregate. Tongues are loosened at such a gathering, and the carefully guarded secrets of trainers and owners are in danger, for the one absorbing topic of conversation is horse, and then more horse.
Shanghai knew exactly where to go, and departed on his mission whistling jubilantly and chinking two silver dollars in his pocket.
At the end of three hours he returned, his hamlike hands thrust deep into empty pockets, and the look in his eye of one who has watched rosy dreams vanish.
"Where you been all this time?" snapped his employer wrathfully. "'As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is a sluggard to them that send him.' I declare, Solomon must have had some black stable boys! What you been at, you triflin' hound?"
Shanghai smiled a sorrowful smile and shook his head.
"Well, you see, kunnel"--Shanghai always gave his employer a high military rank when in fear of rebuke--"you see, kunnel, it took 'em longer'n usual to break me this mawnin'. I start' off right good, but I sutny bowed a tendon an' pulled up lame. Once I toss six passes at them gamblehs----"
"Never mind that! What did you find out about Zanzibar?"
"Oh, him!" Shanghai blinked rapidly as if dispelling a vision. "Zanzibar? Why, kunnel, they aimin' to slip him oveh Satu'day."
"Ah, hah!" Old Man Curry tugged at his white beard. "Ah, hah. I thought so. Had him under cover, eh? Where have they been workin' him?"
"Out on the county road 'bout two miles f'um yere. You know that nice stretch with all them trees? Every mawnin', early, they takes him out----"
"How old is this boy?" asked the canny horseman.
"How ole? Why, kunnel, I reckon he's risin' fifteen, mebbe."
"I loaned him a two-bit piece, kunnel, an' he tol' me all he knowed!"
Old Man Curry fell to combing his beard, and Shanghai retreated to the tackle-room where he found Little Mose.