"I came up to this town with thirty thousand dollars, and not quite a third of it my own. Twenty of it was for a marble quarry we were going to open up on the Potomac. They sent me north to put through the deal. It was new to me, all right. I wasn't used to a town where they have to chain the door-mats down and you daren't speak to your neighbor without a police-permit. And when a prosperous-looking traveler at my hotel got talking about horses and races and the string that Keene sent south last winter, he struck something that was pretty close to me, for that's what we go in for down home--horse-breeding and stock-farming. Then he told me how the assistant superintendent of the Western Union, the man who managed their racing department, was an old friend of his. He also allowed this friend of his was ready to phone him some early track-returns, for what he called a big rakeoff. He even took me down to the Western Union Building, on the corner of Dey and Broadway, and introduced me to a man he called the assistant superintendent. We met him in one of the halls--he was in his shirt-sleeves, and looked like a pretty busy man. He was to hold back the returns until our bets could be laid. He explained that he himself couldn't figure in the thing, but that his sister-in-law might possibly handle the returns over her own private wire." "That sounds very familiar," I sadly commented. "He seemed to lose interest when he found I had only a few thousand dollars of my own. He said the killing would be a quarter of a million, and the risk for holding up the company's despatches would be too great for him to bother with small bets. But he said he'd try out the plan that afternoon. So my traveler friend took me up to a pool-room with racing-sheets and blackboards and half a dozen telegraph keys and twice as many telephones. It looked like the real thing to me. When the returns started to come in and we got our flash, our private tip from the Western Union office, I tried fifty dollars on a three-to-one shot." "And of course you won," was my sympathetic rejoinder, as I sat listening to the old, sad tale. "You always do." "Then I met the woman I spoke about, the woman who called herself the sister-in-law of the racing-wire manager." "And what was _she_ like?" I inquired. "She looked a good deal like any of these women around here," he said with an eye-sweep over the flurry of gull-wing backs and the garden of finery that surrounded us. "_She looked good enough to get my thirty thousand and put me down and out_." At which he laughed his mirthless and mummy-like laugh. "You see, I had sense enough to get cold feet, overnight. But when I talked it over with her next day, and I saw her calling up a few of her Wall Street friends, I kind of forgot my scruples. She got me thinking crooked again. And that's all. That's where the story ends."