“I take it,” said Sam, “from a certain something in your manner, that that moth-eaten whippet of yours did not win his race.”
“Sam,” said Mr. Todhunter, “I will not conceal it from you. I will be frank, open and above board. That whippet did not win.”
“Your money then—and mine—is now going to support some bookie in the style to which he has been accustomed?”
“It’s gorn, Sam,” admitted Mr. Todhunter in a deathbed voice. “Yes, Sam, it’s gorn.”
“Then come and have a drink,” said Sam cordially.
“A drink?”
“Or two.”
He led the way to a hostelry that lurked coyly among shops and office buildings. Hash followed, marvelling. The first stunned horror had passed, and his mind, such as it was, was wrestling with the insoluble problem of why Sam, with the facts of the whippet disaster plainly before him, was so astoundingly amiable.
The hour being early even for a perpetually thirsty community like that of Fleet Street, the saloon bar into which they made their way was free from the crowds which would have interfered with a quiet chat between friends. Two men who looked like printers were drinking beer in a corner, while at the counter a haughty barmaid was mixing a cocktail for a solitary reveller in a velours hat. This individual had just made a remark about the weather in a rich and attractive voice, and his intonation was so unmistakably American that Sam glanced at him as he passed; and, glancing, half stopped, arrested by something strangely familiar about the man’s face.
It was not a face which anyone would be likely to forget if they had seen it often; and the fact that it brought no memories back to him inclined Sam to think that he could never have met this rather striking-looking person, but must have seen him somewhere on the street or in a hotel lobby. He was a handsome, open-faced man of middle-age.