“I asked you to come here,” he began, “because you told my secretary over the phone that you had some new light on this burglary. So far it seems just an ordinary case without any unusual angles.”
“It’s not as ordinary as you think,” said Conington Warren. He offered McWalsh one of his famous cigars. “Incidentally it does not show me up very favorably as I’m bound to admit.”
McWalsh regarded his cigar reverently. Warren smoked nothing but these superb things. What a man! What a man!
“I can’t believe that, Mr. Warren,” he returned.
“Are you interested in the thoroughbreds, McWalsh?”
“Am I?” cried the other enthusiastically. “Why when I couldn’t spend a few hours at old Sheepshead Bay I nearly resigned. Why, Mr. Warren, I made enough on Conington when he won the Brooklyn Handicap to pay the mortgage off on my home!”
“Then you’ll understand,” the sportsman said graciously. “It’s like this. Last year I bought a number of yearlings at the Newmarket sales in England. There’s one of them—a chestnut colt named Saint Beau—who did a most remarkable trial a day or two since. In confidence, inspector, it was better than Conington’s best. Make a note of that but keep it under your hat.”
“I surely will, sir,” cried the ecstatic McWalsh.
“When I heard the time of the trial I gave a little dinner to a number of good pals at Voisin’s.”
The names he mentioned were all of them prominently known in the fashionable world of sport.