I hadn’t been meaning to chat with the fellow, but I was startled.

“How do you mean badly?” I said. “We⁠—he only had a small bet on.”

“I don’t know what you call small. He had thirty quid each way on the Baxter kid.”

The landscape reeled before me.

“What!”

“Thirty quid at ten to one. I thought he must have heard something, but apparently not. The race went by the form-book all right.”

I was trying to do sums in my head. I was just in the middle of working out the syndicate’s losses, when old Heppenstall’s voice came sort of faintly to me out of the distance. He had been pretty fatherly and debonair when ladling out the prizes for the other events, but now he had suddenly grown all pained and grieved. He peered sorrowfully at the multitude.