The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.
Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of bliss deployed itself over his inside. But outwardly he did not bat an eyelid.
'Two hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar,' he said; and the partners were too absorbed with other things to notice that he spoke in a very fair imitation of Mr. Immelbern's deep rumble.
He turned back to them, smiling.
'Baby Face,' he said, with the quietness of absolute certitude, 'will win the three o'clock race at Sandown Park.'
Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios.
'By Gad!' he said.
Half an hour later the three of them went out together for a newspaper. Baby Face had won—at ten to one.
'Haw!' said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather dazedly.
On the face of Mr. Immelbern was a look of almost superstitious awe. It is difficult to convey what was in his mind at that moment. Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true love of his unromantic soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might, in prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if all his private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the backs of unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his pocket. And in the secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always been the wild impossible idea that if by some miracle he could have the privilege of reading the next day's results every day for a week, he could make himself a fortune that would free him for the rest of his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and give him the leisure to perfect that infallible racing system with which he had been experimenting ever since adolescence.
And now the miracle had come to pass, in the person of that debonair and affluent young man who did not even seem to realise the potential millions which lay in his strange gift.
'Can you do that every day?' he asked huskily.
'Oh, yes,' said the Saint.
'In every race?' said Mr. Immelbern hoarsely.
'Why not?' said the Saint. 'It makes racing rather a bore, really, and you soon get tired of drawing in the money.'
Mr. Immelbern gulped. He could not conceive what it felt like to get tired of drawing in money. He felt stunned.
'Well,' said the Saint casually, 'I'd better be buzzing along——'
At the sound of those words something came over Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It was, in its way, the turning of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of Mr. Immelbern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And Mr. Immelbern was still goggling in a half-witted daze—he who had boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.
Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint's arm, gently but very firmly.
'Just a minute, my dear boy,' he said, rolling the words succulently round his tongue. 'We must not be old-fashioned. We must move with the times. This psychic gift of yours is truly remarkable. There's a fortune in it. Damme, if somebody threw a purse into Irnmelbern's lap, he'd be asking me what it was. Thank God, I'm not so dense as that, by Gad. My dear Mr. Templar, my dear boy, you must—I positively insist—you must come back to my rooms and talk about what you're going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad!'
