“I don’t know. I only asked,” replied Hank Swartz coolly. “I’m getting paid by Burnham for certain work I’m doing for him. I wouldn’t tell everybody, but I’m not trying to hide it from you. I thought you might loosen up a little to me—that’s all. We’re old pards. We’ve rode, worked, and bunked together out in the West, both in the cattle country and the mines. But if you want to forget all that, why, it goes with me, too.”
There was so much sadness in the way this was said that Dan Saltus felt obliged to respond. He held out his hand to the other.
“I didn’t mean nothing, Hank,” he protested. “Only it ain’t well to talk too much. I’ll only tell you this much, and you can guess the rest if you have a mind to: Victor Burnham is going to win this race with the Columbiad.”
“I see,” replied Swartz. “I’m glad to hear it. That will make things all O. K. for me at my end of it.”
“How?”
“If Burnham wins the race, it will put Stanley Downs in the wrong with his uncle. He’ll be twenty thousand dollars shy, for one thing, and he’ll fall down in a game that he’s supposed to know all the way through from soup to nuts.”
“Then there’s Ranfelt’s girl!” suggested Dan.
“Yes. Not that Stanley Downs wants her. He never met her till yesterday, when he played into our hands by diving into the lake with her and her Fanchon,” laughed Hank. “But Vic Burnham is crazy for her.”
“What are you handing me, Hank?” demanded Saltus, with an incredulous chuckle. “I never knew Vic Burnham to be crazy over any girl. He wants her dad’s money. That’s all.”