“Jim,” she said slowly, as she grew calmer once more; “Jim, I want you to give me your word of honor that it _will_ be made right! I’m—I’m too cowardly, yet, to do a thing that’s wickedness, through and through. I’ve got to see some glimmer of right in it, I’ve got to feel that it will end right, even—” “But this _will_ end right! It can’t help it. I give you my word of honor, now, to save you from being what you might seem, that every cent of this woman’s money goes back to her.” She was moving her head slowly up and down, as she studied his face. “Then you must remember, through it all, how much I’m trusting myself to you,” she said, with a forlornness that brought a lump in his throat, as she looked about the room with hopeless eyes. “Do you realize how hard all this is going to be?” “It’s not easy, I know—but it’s our only chance.” “_Is_ it our only chance?” she suddenly asked. “Life is full of chances. I saw one today, if I’d only known.” She looked at him again, with some new light sifting through all her tangle of clouds. “Yes,” she went on, more hopefully, “there _might_ be still another way!” “Well?” he asked, almost impatiently, as he glanced at his watch. “It was something that happened when I went into that little Postal-Union office at Broadway and Thirty-seventh Street.” She was speaking rapidly now, with a touch of his former fire. “The relays and everything are in the same room, you know, behind the counter and a wire screen. I wanted my dressmaker, and while I was sitting at a little side-desk chewing my pen-handle and trying to boil seventeen words down to ten, a man came in with a rush message. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. It was Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, and it occurred to me that it might be worth while to know what he was sending out.” “Did he see you, or does he know you?” “I took good pains that he shouldn’t see me. So I scrawled away on my blank, and just sat there and read the ticker as the operator took the despatches off the file and sent them out. Here is the wording of Sunset Bryan’s message, as well as I can remember it: ‘Duke—of—Kendall—runs—tomorrow—get—wise—and—wire—St. Louis—and—South!’” “Well, what of it?” Durkin asked. “Why, this Bryan is the man who took one hundred and ten thousand dollars out of the Aqueduct ring in one day. Since the Gravesend Meeting began, people say he has made nearly half a million. He’s a sort of race-track Curry. He keeps close figures on every race he plays. He has one hundred men and more on his pay roll, and makes his calculations after the most minute investigating and figuring. It stands to reason that he manipulates a little, though the Pinkerton men, as I suppose you know, have never been able to get him off the Eastern tracks. Now, Jim, my firm belief is that there is something ‘cooked up,’ as they say, for tomorrow afternoon, and if we could only find out what this Duke of Kendall business is, we might act on it in time.”