There was a knock at the door. When Langdon opened it Shandy shuffled into the room with a peculiar little rocking-horse sort of gait, just like the trot of a skunk. His whole appearance somehow suggested this despised animal.
“Have you heard anything from the Porter stable?” Langdon asked, when the boy had taken a seat.
“The little mare's well,” the boy answered, laconically.
“That's bad luck for us, Shandy. We'll be poorer by the matter of a few thousand if they win the Derby.”
“Who's we?” questioned Shandy, with saucy directness.
“The whole stable. A man has played The Dutchman to win a hundred thousand, an' he's goin' to give the boys, one or two of them, five hundred if it comes off.”
The small imp's weak, red-lidded eyes took on a hungry, famished look. “What're you givin' us is that straight goods?” he demanded, doubtingly.
Langdon didn't answer the question direct; he said: “My man's afraid somebody'll get at The Dutchman. There's a lot of horse sickness about, an' if anyone was to take some of the poison from a sick horse's nose and put it in The Dutchman's nostrils at night, why he'd never start in the Derby, I reckon.”
A look of deep cunning crept into the boy's thin freckled face; his eyes contracted and blinked nervously.
“What th' 'ell's the difference? If the Porter mare starts Redpath thinks he's got a lead-pipe cinch.”