13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

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!"

Mr. Immelbern did not come out of his trance until half­way through the bargaining that followed.

It was nearly two hours later when the two partners strug­gled somewhat short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture consisted of a chair, a table with a telephone on it, and a tape machine in one corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served its pur­pose adequately.

The third and very junior member of the partnership sat on the chair with his feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette and turning the pages of Paris Plaisirs. He looked up in some surprise not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his confederates—a pimply youth with a chin that barely con­trived to separate his mouth from his neck.

"I've made our fortunes!" yelled Mr. Immelbern, and, despite the youth's repulsive aspect, embraced him.

A slight frown momentarily marred the Colonel's glowing benevolence.

"What d'you mean—you've made our fortunes?" he demanded. "If it hadn't been for me——"

"Well, what the hell does it matter?" said Mr. Immelbern. "In a couple of months we'll all be millionaires."

"How?" asked the pimply youth blankly.

Mr. Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised hornpipe.

"It's like this," he explained exuberantly. "We've got a sike —sidekick——"

"Psychic," said the Colonel.

"A bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the winners off like you'd read them out of a paper. He did it four times this afternoon. We're going to take him in with us. We had a job to persuade him—he was going off to the South of France tonight—can you imagine it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there's any racing here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance on the money we told him we were going to make for him to make him put it off. But it's worth it. We'll start tomorrow, and if this fellow Templar——"

"Ow, that's 'is nime, is it?" said the pimply youth brightly. "I wondered wot was goin' on."

There was a short puzzled silence.

"How do you mean—what was going on?" asked the Colonel at length.

"Well," said the pimply youth, "when Sid was ringing up all the afternoon, practic'ly every rice——"

"What d'you mean?" croaked Mr. Immelbern. "I rang up every race?"