It seemed to Maud that, seated there in his own house, she saw him under a new aspect. He played the host with ability and no small amount of tact.
He talked mainly about the stud, interesting her in a subject which she had never before viewed at close quarters. He described various events in which some of his charges had won distinction, and presently, to Bunny's keen delight; he began a brief but stirring description of an attempt to tamp with one of the animals two summers before on the eve of one of the Graydown Races. Some inkling of the intended attempt had reached him, and he himself had lain in wait to frustrate it.
"But how?" cried Bunny breathlessly.
"I decided to spend the night in the loose-box," said Jake. "There's no hardship in sleeping alongside a good horse. I've done it many a time. I wasn't so intimate with Lord Saltash then as I am now, but I knew enough not to be altogether surprised when he came sliding into the stable-yard a little after midnight in a two-seated car and made straight for the loose-box where I was. The top half of the door was ajar, and there was a dim lamp burning in the yard, but his head-lights showed up everything like day. He pushed the top half right back and leaned his arms on the lower and said, 'That you, Bolton?' I got up and went to him. There was no one else about. 'I've put myself in charge this trip,' I told him. 'You needn't be nervous.' He grinned in a sickly sort of fashion and said, 'I am nervous--deuced nervous, and I'll tell you why. If that brute runs to-morrow I'm a ruined man.' And then he started jawing about some fool wager he'd made, said he was under the thumb of some rascally booky, and actually began to try and talk me into spoiling the animal's chances."
Jake paused. He was looking at Maud as if he expected something.
She looked back at him, her head very high, her eyes shining defiantly bright. "Lord Saltash has a double apparently?" she said.
"Now, that's real clever of you!" said Jake, with a smile. "Yes, that is the key to the mystery, and I soon grasped it. He offered me a large sum of money to prevent Pedro running. Pedro was listening to the transaction with his head on my shoulder. I said yes to everything, and then I suggested that we should settle the details outside where there was no chance of witnesses. He agreed to that, and I picked up my whip and got into his car after him, and we slipped out and ran about half-a-mile into the Park where I stopped him."
Jake paused again, still looking expectantly at the girl facing him. She was flushed but evidently not greatly moved.
"What a thrilling recital!" she said.
And, "Go on!" urged Bunny impatiently.