"Haw!" ejaculated the Colonel uncertainly, feeling that he was called upon to make some sound; and the Saint smiled distantly.
He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.
"Let me show you. I wasn't going to make any bets today, but since I've started I may as well go on."
He picked up his lunch edition, which he had been reading in the Palace Royal lounge, and studied the racing card on the back page. Then he put down the paper and covered his eyes. For several seconds there was a breathless silence, while he stood there with his head in his hands, swaying slightly, in an attitude of terrific concentration.
Again the supernatural shiver went over the two partners; and then the Saint straightened up suddenly, opened his eyes, and rushed to the telephone.
He dialed his number rather slowly. He had watched the movements of Mr. Immelbern's fingers closely, on every one of that gentleman's five calls; and his keen ears had listened and calculated every click of the returning dial. It would not be his fault if he got the wrong number.
The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.
"Baby Face," it said hollowly.
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!"
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?"
"Yus, an' I was giving' you the winners, an' you were syin' 'Two 'undred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar'— Tour 'undred pounds on Cellophane for Mr. Templar'— gettin' bigger an' bigger all the time an' never givin' 'im a loser—well, I started to wonder wot was 'appening."
The silence that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.
It was the Colonel who broke it.
"It's impossible," he said dizzily. "I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes—and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races."
"Then 'e must 'ave put it back some more while you wasn't watchin' 'im," said the pimply youth stolidly.
The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.
"By Gad!" said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.
Mr. Immelbern did not speak. He was removing his coat and rolling up his sleeves, with his eyes riveted yearningly on the Colonel's aristocratic block.