with disfavor.

Again Wallingford chuckled.

"Know them!" he replied. "I should say I do! Green-Goods Harry Phelps
and Badger Billy Banting? Why, they and their friends, Short-Card
Larry Teller and Yap Pickins, framed up a stud poker game on me the
first week I hit town, with the lovely idea of working a phoney pinch
on me; but I got a real cop to hand them the triple cross, and took
five thousand away from them so easy it was like taking four-o'clock
milk from a doorstep."

"I'm glad of it," she said, with as much trace of vindictiveness as
her beauty specialist would have permitted. "They're an awful
low-class crowd. They came over to my table one night in Shirley's,
after I'd met them only once, and butted in on a rich gentleman friend
of mine from Washington. They run up an awful bill on him and never
offered even to buy cigars, and then when he was gone for a minute to
pick out our wagon, they tried to get fresh with me right in front of
mother. I'm glad somebody stung 'em."

A very thick-set man, with an inordinately broad jaw and an
indefinable air of blunt aggressiveness, came past them and nodded to
J. Rufus with a grudging motion toward his shapeless slouch hat.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"Jake Block," he replied. "A big owner with so much money he could bed
his horses in it, and an ingrowing grouch that has put a crimp in his
information works. He's never been known to give out a tip since he
was able to lisp 'mamma.' He eats nothing but _table d'hote_ dinners
so he won't have to tell the waiters what he likes."

Jake Block, on some brief errand to the press box, returned just as J.
Rufus was starting down to the betting-shed, and he stopped a moment.

"How are you picking them to-day, Wallingford?" he asked
perfunctorily, with his eye on Beauty Phillips.

"Same way," confessed Wallingford. "I haven't cashed a ticket in
the meeting. I have the kind of luck that would scale John D.
Rockefeller's bank-roll down to the size of a dance-program lead
pencil."

"Well," said Jake philosophically, his eyes still on the Beauty,
"sometimes they come bad for a long time, and then they come worse."

At this bit of wisdom J. Rufus politely laughed, and the silvery voice
of Beauty Phillips suddenly joined his own; whereupon J. Rufus, taking
the hint, introduced Mr. Block to Miss Phillips and her mother. Mr.
Block promptly sat down by them.

"I've heard a lot about you," he began, "but I've not been around to