“What price against the peeler?” called out some one in the ring. To which there was an answering yell of “Any odds!”
“He knows where he’s going to finish—it’s Stella Land he is making for, and my opinion is he will get there, for none of our men have anything that will catch him,” the Kimberley inspector said, and he looked at the grey-haired man with grim smile.
“Where is that man who interfered with me? Ah, it’s you, is it?” the latter said as he saw McNeil, who was straining his eyes at the race, not on the card, which was now taking place; “so you knew me, did you? I fancy I know you.”
“Know you, old man! I’d have known yer made into soup. Glad you remember me, for you’ve no old accounts against me,” the big man answered cheerily enough.
In the mean time George Marshall, the rider of Lone Star, had gone to the weighing-room.
“I’ll weigh in at once, I think; and I fancy old Lone Star has won this race after all, for Sir Harry Ferriard won’t pass the scales unless he loses the race he is riding now, and it’s long odds on him for that,” he said to the stewards who were superintending there.
The rider of Induna, Sir Harry Ferriard, alias Slim Jim, alias Captain Barton, alias et cetera, never did come back to weigh in. He never came back to Kimberley at all.
Mr Lascelles never saw his aristocratic acquaintance or his horse Induna again. The former turned out to be a well-known criminal, who was wanted by the London police for a heavy Bill forgery case. Inspector Sharp of Scotland Yard had tracked him out to the Diamond Fields, and just arrived by the coach in time to get up to the racecourse and see him go down to the start on Induna.
The inspector does not often speak about that trip to South Africa, which he hoped would have been such a successful episode in his professional career. He has a mean opinion of a country where a fast horse enables a fugitive to get away from the police.
Joe Warton won the bets he was in such a hurry to make, and he spent the money in furnishing a house for Pretty Polly Short, who became Mrs Warton after all. She told him that before the sensational end of that queer race she had determined to give up the idea of becoming Lady Ferriard, on the chance of making it up with him again, and he believed her.