“Who, me!” Joe came back.  “Why I didn’t get here in time to place a bet.  I drove over from Elmhurst and the blue mare burst a tire.  But, say, I’ve got a mother’s darling in the third race!  Oh, it’s a ladybug for certain!  You guys play ‘Perhaps’ to win and you’ll go home looking like Pierp Morgan after a busy day.  It can’t lose, this clam can’t!  Say, that horse ‘Perhaps’ wears gold-plated overshoes and it can kick more track behind it than any ostrich you ever see!  Why,| it’s got ball-bearing castors on the feet and it wears a naphtha engine in the forward turret.  Get reckless with the coin, boys, and go the limit, and if the track happens to cave in and it does lose, I’ll drag you down to Elmhurst behind the blue mare and make the suction pump in the backyard do an imitation of Walter Jones singing ‘Captain Kidd’ with the bum pipes.”

Joe was so much in earnest about it that Bunch and I put up fifty on “Perhaps” and waited.

We are still waiting.

“Perhaps” may have been a good horse but he had a bad memory and never could recollect which end of the track was the proper place to finish.

Joe must have left for Elmhurst immediately after the race because he failed to answer roll call.

Then we ran across Dave Torrence, the famous inventor of the disappearing trump so much used by pinochle players.

When Dave began to dope ’em out for us Bunch and I hid our pocketbooks in our shoes.

“Here’s a good one,” Dave suggested; “listen to this ‘Easy Money’ out of ‘Life Insurance’ by ‘Director.’  And here’s a good one, ‘Chauffeur’ out of ‘Automobile’ by ‘Policeman!’ Do you care for those?”

There were tears in Bunch’s eyes, but I was busy looking for a rock.

“Here are some more peacherinos,” Dave went on, relentlessly, “here is ‘Golf Player’ out of ‘Business’ by ‘Mosquito,’ and here’s another good one, ‘Eternal Daylights’ out of ‘Russia’ by ’Japan’—­like ’em?”

Bunch and I handed Dave the reproachful face and fled for our lives.

Then we got down to business and began to lose our money with more system and less noise.

At the end of the fifth race we hadn’t the price of a leather sandwich between us.

Every dog we had mentioned to the Bookies proved to be a false alarm.

Every turtle we plunged on carried our money to the bonfire and dumped it in.

“My little black man is whimpering, Bunch,” I said.  “I’m cured.”

“One hundred and sixty bucks to the bad for mine,” laughed Bunch.  “I guess that will hold me temporarily.  Come on, John; let’s hop in the Bubble and dash back to the Hotel Astor; the girls will be waiting for us.”

We hurried to the spot where Flash Harvey was to leave the gas-hopper but there was no sign of Flash or the machine.

Seven o’clock came and still no sign of Flash or the Bubble, and there we sat, two sad boys without a baubee in the jeans, hungry to the limit and with an ever present vision of our two worried wives displacing a bunch of expensive space in a restaurant while they waited for us to show.