Up and down Broadway, from rathskellers to roof-gardens, in cafes and lobster palaces, on the corners of the cross-roads, in clubs and all-night restaurants, Carter’s tip was as a red rag to a bull. Was the boy drunk, they demanded, or had his miraculous luck turned his head? Otherwise, why would he so publicly utter a prophecy that on the morrow must certainly smother him with ridicule. The explanations were varied. The men in the clubs held he was driven by a desire for notoriety, the men in the street that he was more clever than they guessed, and had made the move to suit his own book, to alter the odds to his own advantage. Others frowned mysteriously. With superstitious faith in his luck, they pointed to his record. “Has he ever lost a bet? How do WE know what HE knows?” they demanded. “Perhaps it’s fixed and he knows it!” The “wise” ones howled in derision. “A Suburban FIXED!” they retorted. “You can fix ONE jockey, you can fix TWO; but you can’t fix sixteen jockeys! You can’t fix Belmont, you can’t fix Keene. There’s nothing in his picking Beldame, but only a crazy man would pick the horse for the place and to show, and shut out the favorite! The boy ought to be in Matteawan.” Still undisturbed, still confident to those to whom he had promised them, Carter sent a wire. Nor did he forget his old enemy, “Sol” Burbank. “If you want to get some of the money I took,” he telegraphed, “wipe out the Belmont entry and take all they offer on Delhi. He cannot win.” And that night, when each newspaper called him up at his flat, he made the same answer. “The three horses will finish as I said. You can state that I gave the information as I did as a sort of present to the people of New York City.” In the papers the next morning “Carter’s Tip” was the front-page feature. Even those who never in the racing of horses felt any concern could not help but take in the outcome of this one a curious interest. The audacity of the prophecy, the very absurdity of it, presupposing, as it did, occult power, was in itself amusing. And when the curtain rose on the Suburban it was evident that to thousands what the Man Who Could Not Lose had foretold was a serious and inspired utterance. This time his friends gathered around him, not to benefit by his advice, but to protect him. “They’ll mob you!” they warned. “They’ll tear the clothes off your back. Better make your getaway now.” Dolly, with tears in her eyes, sat beside him. Every now and again she touched his hand. Below his box, as around a newspaper office on the night when a president is elected, the people crushed in a turbulent mob. Some mocked and jeered, some who on his tip had risked their every dollar, hailed him hopefully. On every side policemen, fearful of coming trouble, hemmed him in. Carter was bored extremely, heartily sorry he had on the night before given way to what he now saw as a perverse impulse. But he still was confident, still undismayed.