And the Banker pondered for a minute, then he said, “Whose garden are the berries in, Mr. Porter, yours or mine?”
“Well, you've always been a good friend of mine, Mr. Crane,” Porter answered, evasively.
“I see,” said the other, meditatively; “I understand. I'm much obliged. If I thought for an instant that any trainer wasn't dealing perfectly straightforward with me, I'd have nothing more to do with him--nothing whatever.”
Crane sat looking through the open window at John Porter as the latter went down the street. About his thin-lipped, square-framed mouth hovered an expression that might have been a smile, or an intense look of interest, or a touch of avaricious ferocity. The gray eyes peeped over the wall of their lower lids, and in them, too, was the unfathomable something.
“Yes,” he repeated, as though Porter still stood beside him, “if Langdon tried to deceive me, I'd crush him. Poor old Porter with his story of the strawberries! If he were as clever as he is honest, he wouldn't have been stuck with a horse like Lauzanne. I told Langdon to get rid of that quitter, but I almost wish he'd found another buyer for him. The horse taint is pretty strong in that Porter blood. How the girl said that line,
'And a hush came over the clamorous mob; Like a babe on his neck I was sobbing.'
Crane sat for an hour. Porter had vanished from the landscape, but still the Banker's thoughts clung to his personality as though the peeping eyes saw nothing else.
From the time of the first loan obtained upon Ringwood, Crane had coveted the place. It appealed to him with its elm-bordered, sweeping driveway, leading from gate to old colonial residence. Its thick-grassed fields and running water made it just the place for a man who tempered his passion for racing with common sense. And it would pass from Porter's hands right enough--Crane knew that. Porter might call it ill luck, but he, Crane the Banker, knew it was the lack of something, the inability to make money.
“Made music to me on Crusader.” Yes, that was it. With the Porters it was jingle of spurs, and stride of the horse. All very fine in theory, but racing, as he looked at it, was a question of proper odds, and many other things connected with the betting ring.