“The trainer hides things?” queried Crane.
“Some do. But the outsiders walking down wind see the berries.”
And the Banker pondered for a minute, then he said, “Whose garden are the berries in, Mr. Porter, yours or mine?”
“Well, you've always been a good friend of mine, Mr. Crane,” Porter answered, evasively.
“I see,” said the other, meditatively; “I understand. I'm much obliged. If I thought for an instant that any trainer wasn't dealing perfectly straightforward with me, I'd have nothing more to do with him—nothing whatever.”
Crane sat looking through the open window at John Porter as the latter went down the street. About his thin-lipped, square-framed mouth hovered an expression that might have been a smile, or an intense look of interest, or a touch of avaricious ferocity. The gray eyes peeped over the wall of their lower lids, and in them, too, was the unfathomable something.
“Yes,” he repeated, as though Porter still stood beside him, “if Langdon tried to deceive me, I'd crush him. Poor old Porter with his story of the strawberries! If he were as clever as he is honest, he wouldn't have been stuck with a horse like Lauzanne. I told Langdon to get rid of that quitter, but I almost wish he'd found another buyer for him. The horse taint is pretty strong in that Porter blood. How the girl said that line,
'And a hush came over the clamorous mob;
Like a babe on his neck I was sobbing.'
She's cleverer than her father.”
Crane sat for an hour. Porter had vanished from the landscape, but still the Banker's thoughts clung to his personality as though the peeping eyes saw nothing else.