“Go on!” returned Blackie delightedly. “You don’t mean to say you’re sorting some of your own money there?”
“I sure am,” laughed Wallingford, picking up a five-dollar bill. “I think this must be it. What’s the New York horse to-day?”
Blackie consulted a list that lay on his desk.
“Whipsaw,” he said.
“Whipsaw! By George, Blackie, if there’s any one thing I’d like to do, it’d be to whipsaw some friends of yours on Broadway.” Whereupon he told Blackie, with much picturesque embellishment, just how Messrs. Phelps, Teller, Banting and Pickins had managed to annex the Razzoo money.
Blackie enjoyed that recital very much.
“The Broadway Syndicate is still on the job,” he commented. “Well, J. Rufus, let this teach you how to take a joke next time.”
“I’m not saying a word,” replied Wallingford. “Any time I let a kindergarten crowd like that work a trick on me that was invented right after Noah discovered spoiled grape juice, I owe myself a month in jail. But watch me. I’ll make moccasins out of their hides, all right.”
“Go right ahead, old man, and see if I care,” consented Blackie. “Slam the harpoon into them and twist it.”
“I will,” asserted Wallingford confidently. “I don’t like them because they’re grouches; I don’t like them because they’re cheap; I don’t like their names, nor their faces, nor the town they live in. Making money in New York’s too much like sixteen hungry bulldogs to one bone. The best dog gets it, but he finishes too weak for an appetite. What kind of a horse is this Whipsaw you’re sending out to-day?”