“Of course you may wish who you like to win; and what’s more, you will have what you wish for, for Lone Star won’t have a chance against Induna,” he said, as he left the house.
Polly watched him go through the garden, and listened to the tread of his feet as he walked away along the road. His very walk seemed to tell how angry and hurt he was. For a minute or two she felt a little guilty and sorry. After all she liked him a good deal. Though he was heavy and perhaps a little stupid, and at times by no means sweet-tempered, he was a good honest fellow and perfectly devoted to her. To tell the truth she had been upset by the attentions of her new admirer, Sir Harry. She was not more silly than most girls of her age, but she could not help thinking that the element of romance which was wanting in Joe Warton was present in the other. When she looked at Sir Harry’s good-looking face she told herself that he could care a good deal more for a woman than Joe could. Then he had a title and two or three places in England, and if she married him she would live in London and be in society, instead of living on the Diamond Fields, and that counted for a good deal with her, as it naturally would with a high-spirited girl who had plenty of ambition and wish to see the world. She knew that colonial girls had married Englishmen of family and gone home and held their own there, and she did not see why she could not do it.
Warton went round to his friend Marshall’s house, and found him turning in.
When he told the latter what he had done about Lone Star, and what he had heard about Induna being entered by Mr Lazarus, or Lascelles, as that gentleman had taken to call himself since he had made money on the Diamond Fields, he got very little sympathy.
“You must have been a fool to have backed the mare before you knew the entries. Believed Lazarus would not enter Induna because he said he was not going to, why he would sell his brother to please his friend Sir Harry; besides, he is not above a robbery on his own account. And as for its not paying them to enter the horse, and to have to buy it in, why they can back it for a good bit. Probably Howlett was doing it for them when he laid you those bets,” said Marshall.
“Do you think we have any chance? I should like to beat that fellow Ferriard.”
“Chance! devil a bit; no race is a certainty till the jockey is weighed in, and it’s all right. But this goes pretty near one.”
Warton went off greatly irritated with himself, and very much cut up and pained about Polly Short’s treatment of him. When he got back to his house he sat for some time in a chair outside his house, smoking and thinking over the unpleasant events of the evening. He had half gone to sleep when he was woke up by hearing the voices of two men, who were passing along the road on the side of the reed fence round his garden.
“Waste my time, do you say? don’t see it—why we haven’t done badly to-night, or this week either; and one can’t be always at business. What’s life without sentiment, my dear Bill?”
“All right, we ain’t done so bad to-night, only it’s a bit rilin’ when one sees a chance of getting up a bit of Poker or Loo to find that you’re hanging after that girl and out of the way.”