“Then MacNutt’s been working on this scheme for a long while?”
“Yes, this house has been rented by the month, furnished, just as you see it, simply because it stood in about the right place. We have even lost a few hundred dollars, altogether, in Penfield’s different places. But, in the end, the three of us are to hit Penfield together, on a ragged field, when there’s a chance for heavy odds. But, of course, we can do it only once!”
“And then what?” asked Durkin.
Again the girl shrugged a shoulder.
“Penfield’s patrons are all wealthy men,” she went on, in a sort of pedagogic explicitness. “The betting, particularly at the upper house, is always very heavy. A book of a hundred thousand dollars is common enough; sometimes it goes up to two or three hundred thousand. So, you see, it all depends on our odds. MacNutt himself hopes to make at least a hundred thousand. But then he has worked and brooded over it all so long, I don’t think he sees things quite clearly now!”
It was her first shadow of reflection on their chief, and Durkin caught up the cue.
“He seems sharp enough still, to leave you and me here, to take all the risk in a raid,” he protested.
“Yes,” she assented, with the touch of weariness that came into her voice at times. “He is shrewd and sharp—shrewder and sharper than you would dare believe.”
“And of course you understand your risk, now, here, from this moment on?”
“Yes, I quite understand it,” she answered, with unbetraying evenness of voice.