“I want you to run up to Saratoga,” the city editor said to him one day after he had been long enough in the flat to pay a second month’s rent. “You can go up to-night, do the work to-morrow, and come back to-morrow night. I have had several reports about unfair dealings among the bookmakers, and I want you to go out to the race track and investigate for yourself. Make full inquiries; and after you have all your facts go to Hyer, the leading bookmaker, tell him just what reports we have heard, and ask him what he has to say about it.” Dick had never ridden before in such a train as carried him to Saratoga that night. It was one of the famous “Saratoga Specials,” made up of a dozen parlor cars and drawn by two powerful engines. Leaving New York at six in the evening it set him down in Saratoga before midnight, and he slept in a gorgeous room in the Grand Union Hotel, with music playing on the balcony and colored lights flashing across the fountain in the courtyard. It seemed to him next day as if half of New York had migrated to Saratoga. He knew a great many people in the city, and almost every other man he met he was sure he had seen before. Many of them he knew, and some of these were of great assistance to him in making his investigations. He did a hard day’s work, but after all it amounted to nothing, for he could discover nothing irregular in the bookmakers’ methods. He still had Mr. Hyer, the chief bookmaker, to see, and it was nearly six o’clock in the evening before he found him in the lobby of the hotel. None of your vulgar, horsey, gambler-looking men was Mr. Hyer, with flashy clothes and showy jewelry; but a most respectable-appearing man, so quiet in dress and manner that he might readily have been mistaken for a clergyman. Dick stepped up and introduced himself and asked for a few moments’ conversation. “We had better go into this little writing room,” said Mr. Hyer, “where we can talk without interruption;” and he led the way into a cozy little room with a beautiful table in the centre and the softest of chairs on each side. There was no hesitation on Dick’s part now about talking to strangers. It was an old story with him, and he felt as much at home with a man he had never seen before as with an old friend. Certainly he had never talked with a more polite or more agreeable man than Mr. Hyer. Dick told the bookmaker what reports had reached the Transport office about unfair methods on the race track, and Mr. Hyer listened with great attention. “It is very kind of you,” he said when Dick concluded his story, “to come directly to me with these reports, instead of publishing them first and investigating afterward. But that is quite like the Transport’s way of doing; they have always treated me with the greatest fairness. These reports have been circulated by enemies of mine who seek to do me harm, and I can show you in a few words that they are utterly unfounded.”