"That's my guess, too!" snapped Goldmark. "I'm paying you to watch that Curry stable; get me? And I want you to watch it! I want to know everything that happens around there from now on, understand? Particularly, I want a line on this Elisha horse. Know him when you see him?"
"S-s-sure!" said Squeaking Henry. "Sure I do! Big, leggy bay with a white spot on his forehead about the size of a nickel. Do I know him? Well!"
"I want to know when Curry works him—how far and how fast. I want to know what the old man thinks of his chances in the Handicap. You can get me at the hotel every night after dinner. Better use the telephone. In case you slip up or miss me, send word by Al Engle."
"All right," said Henry.
"And say," Goldmark actually grinned, "I hear this Curry is a soft-hearted old fellow. Why couldn't you tell him a hard-luck story and get to sleep in his tack-room nights? Then you'd be right on the ground. Try a hard-luck story on him. The one you sprang on me wasn't so bad."
"H-m-m-m," mused Henry. "I might, and that's a fact. He ain't a bad guy, Old Man Curry ain't. He stakes the hustlers every once in a while."
"Well," said Goldmark insinuatingly, "if he should be such a sucker as to stake you, don't forget you was on my pay roll first; that's all I ask."
"Aw, whadda you take me for?" growled Squeaking Henry, virtuously indignant at the barest hint of duplicity. "I ain't that kind of a guy."
Since the tout lives by his wits and his tongue, he is never without a hard-luck story—a dependable one, tried, but seldom, if ever, true. He circles human nature, searching for the weak point and, having found it, delivers the attack. Squeaking Henry knew the armour plate to be thinnest on man's sympathetic side, and the hard-luck story which he told Old Man Curry would have melted the heart of a golf club handicapper. The story was overworked and threadbare in spots, but it brought an immediate result.
"And that's how I'm fixed," whined Squeaking Henry in conclusion. "I think I can rustle the eats all right enough—one meal a day anyway—and if I just had a place to sleep——" He paused and regarded Old Man Curry expectantly.