“Well, this certainly does beat me!” he said, at last, slowly, yet contentedly enough.
The young woman looked at him; and he caught a second glimpse of her wistfully pensive smile, while his heart began to thump, in spite of himself. He reached out a hesitating hand, as though to touch her.
“What is it?” she asked, in her mellow English contralto.
“I don’t exactly know,” he answered, with his hand before his eyes. “I wish you’d tell me.”
She came and sat down in a chair before him, pushing back her tumbled hair with one hand, seeming to be measuring him with her intent gaze. She appeared in some way not altogether dissatisfied with him; it seemed almost as if she had taken his face between her two hands, and read it, feature by feature.
“I hardly know where to begin,” she hesitated. “I mean, I don’t know how much they’ve explained to you already. Indeed, there’s a great deal I don’t understand myself. But, of course, you know that we have tapped Penfield’s private wire.”
He nodded an assenting head toward the little brass sounder.
“And, of course, you are able to judge why. He gets all the race returns at the club house, and then sends them on by private ’phone to his other two pool-rooms. He has to do it that way, now that New York is not so open, and ever since the Postal-Union directors pretended to cut out their sporting service.”
Durkin knew all this, but he waited for the sake of hearing her voice and watching the play of her features.
“Every track report, you know, comes into New York by way of the race department of the Postal-Union on lower Broadway. There, messenger boys hurry about with the reports to the different wire-operators, who wire the returns to the company’s different subscribers. Penfield, of course, is really one of them, though it’s not generally known.”