“You’re all right, little girl,” he said genially, as his six feet of insolent rotundity came and towered over her. “You’re all right! And a little dimple in your chin, too.” A new wave of courage seemed pumping through all of the shrinking girl’s veins, of a sudden, and she looked up at her enemy unwaveringly, smiling a little. Whereupon he smilingly and admiringly pinched her ear, and insisted that she have a “John Collins” with him. Again she felt the necessity of talking. Unless the stress of action came to save her she felt that she would faint. “I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she began hurriedly. “The devil you are!” he said with a note of disappointment, his wagging head still on one side, in undisguised admiration. “Yes, I’m from the Journal,” she began. “Then how did you get this card?” “That’s a mistake in the office—the clerk must have sent you the wrong one,” she answered glibly. “Come off! Come off! You good-looking women are all after me!” and he pinched her ear again. “I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she found herself rattling on, as she stood there quaking in mysterious fear of him, “and we’re going to run a story about you being the Monte Cristo of modern circuit-followers, and all that sort of thing. Then we want to know if it was true that you copped one hundred and sixty thousands dollars on Africander at Saratoga, and if you would let our photographer get some nice pictures of your rooms here, and a good one of yourself—oh, yes, you would take a splendid picture. And then I wanted to know if it is true that your system is to get two horses that figure up as if they each had a good square chance and then play the longer of the two and put enough on the other for a place to cover your losses if the first one should lose. And our sporting editor has said that you make that a habit, and that often enough you are able to cash on both, and that you—” “Say, look here, little girl, what in the devil are you driving at, anyway?” “I’m a reporter on the Morning Journal,” she reiterated, vacuously, foolishly, passing her hand across her forehead with a weak little gesture of bewilderment. She could feel her courage withering away. Alcohol, she was learning, was an ally of untimely retreats. “Well, it’s a shame for a girl like you to get afraid of me this way! Hold on, now, don’t butt in! It’s not square to use a mouth like that for talking—I’d rather see it laughing, any day. So just cool down and tell me, honest and out-and-out, what it is you’re after.” She flung herself forward and hung on him, in a quite unlooked for paroxysm of hysteria, apparently reckless of the moment and the menace. “It’s this,” she sobbed in a sudden mental obsession, the tears of actual anguish running down her face. “It’s this,” she went on shrilly, hurriedly. “_I’ve put my money on the Duke of Kendall today—and if he doesn’t come in, I’m going to kill myself!_”