"Come with me—I've been in this building before," answered the former bully of Oak Hall.
He led the way to an alley halfway down the block. This ran to the rear of the tavern, where there was a door communicating with a hallway and a back stairs. Under the stairs was a closet filled with discarded cooking utensils. The closet had two doors, one opening into a drinking-room behind the main bar-room of the tavern.
Looking through a crack of the door, they saw that the three men had seated themselves, the proprietor of the resort spending his time with some men in front.
"Now give us the straight of the story," Blodgett was saying.
Thereupon Crandall launched into a tale that took him the best part of ten minutes to relate. From his talk it was clear that a man named Dodsworth Sadler, of Hartford, had met the three men at Albany and gambled with them on three different occasions. Sadler had lost several hundred dollars one night and nearly a thousand the next, and then Blodgett and Volney had come away. Now Sadler had discovered that marked cards were in use at the place he had visited, and he was satisfied that he had been swindled, if not in all the games at least in some of them.
"Well, we did him up, that's certain," said Blodgett, with a coarse laugh. "But I don't want him to learn the truth if it can be helped."
"No, we want to keep him in the dark—hold him down like that boarding-school chap here," chuckled Volney.
"Never mind about that," said Blodgett, sharply.
"Got somebody else on the string here, eh?" observed Crandall. "You always were the boys to keep things moving."
"Oh, this is only a small affair—mere pocket money," answered Blodgett.