For nine long months the ex-officer had sought employment, indoor or outdoor, congenial or uncongenial. The quest was vain. Once he had broached the matter haltingly to an influential acquaintance. The latter's reception of his distress had been so startlingly obnoxious that he would have died rather than repeat the venture. Then Smith of Dale's, Old Bond Street--Smith, who had cut his hair since he was a boy, and was his fast friend--had told him of Blue Moon. There is more racing chatter to be heard at the great hairdressers' than almost anywhere else outside a race-course. Some of it is worth hearing, most of it is valueless. The difficulty, as elsewhere, is to sift the wheat from the chaff. According to Smith, Blue Moon was being kept extremely quiet. Certainly the horse was little mentioned. Lyveden had never heard his name. And thirty-three to one was a long price.... Lyveden pricked up his ears, and Smith became frightened. He was genuinely attached to his young customer, and knew that he was in low water. He begged him not to be rash.... After some careful calculations, which he made upon a sheet of club note-paper, Lyveden came to the conclusion that thirty-three birds in the bush were better than one in the hand. Reckoning a bird at one hundred pounds and Lyveden's available assets at the same number of guineas, who is to say he was wrong? At twenty minutes to five on the eve of the Derby, Lyveden handed a protesting Smith one hundred and one pounds, to be invested on Blue Moon--"to win only." The odd note was to bring Smith his reward. A big bookmaker whom Smith was shaving as usual, at a quarter-past six, accepted the commission, pocketed the notes with a sigh, and gave the master-barber forty to one. Four thousand pounds--in the bush. That his thirty-three nebulous birds had become forty before they took flight, Anthony never knew. A man whose sole assets are a Sealyham, a very few clothes, and twenty-two shillings and sixpence, does not, as a rule, go to Dale's. "Young fellow, come here." Patch came gaily, and Lyveden set him upon his knee.