The bell clanged imperiously at the Judges' Stand. Porter pulled out his watch and looked at it.
“That's saddling,” he remarked, laconically; “I must go and have a bit on the mare, and then take a look at her before she goes out.”
As Porter went down the steps his companion leaned over the rail and crooked his fingers at a thin-faced man with a blond mustache who had been keeping a corner of his eye on the box.
“What are they making favorite, Lewis?” queried Danby, as the thin-faced man stood beside him.
“Porter tells me Lucretia is good business,” said Danby, in a tentative tone.
“Langdon thinks it's all over bar the shouting; he says Lauzanne outclasses his field,” retorted Lewis.
“Langdon's a betting man; Porter's an owner, and a good judge,” objected Danby; “and he's got a good boy up, too, McKay,” he added, slowly focusing his field glasses on the jockey board opposite the Stand.
“Crooked as a dog's hind legs,” snarled Lewis, biting viciously at his cigar.
“Bob, it's damned hard to find a straight-legged dog,” laughed Danby. “And when John Porter starts a horse, there's never anything doing. Here's six hundred; put' it on the mare--straight.”
As Lewis pushed his way into the shoving, seething, elbowing crowd in the betting ring, he was suddenly struck in the chest by something which apparently had the momentum of an eight-inch shell; but it was only John Porter, who, in breaking through the outer crust of the living mass, had been ejected with more speed than was of his own volition.
Bob smothered the expletive that had risen to his lip when he saw who the unwitting offender was, and asked, “What are they doin' to the mare in the ring?”
“Not much,” answered his assailant, catching his breath; “there's a strong play on Langdon's horse, and if I didn't know my boy pretty well, and Lucretia better, I'd have weakened a bit. But she can't lose, she can't lose!” he repeated in the tone of a man who is reassuring himself.
Lewis battled his way along till he stood in front of a bookmaker with a face cast very much on the lines of a Rubens' cherub; but the cherub-type ended abruptly with the plump frontispiece of “Jakey” Faust, the bookmaker. Lewis knew that. “If there's anythin' doin', I'm up against it here,” he muttered to himself. “What's Lauzanne's price?” he asked, in an indifferent voice, for the bookmaker's assistant was busy changing the figures on his list.