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Rh after a glance or two at the staring headlines Odell laid them aside.

"I suppose the boys couldn't be kept off it much longer in any event," he commented. "I can't talk about it now, Jim, but there isn't any joke about it. I'd like to get a line on what Lorne has been doing to the market during the last two months."

"What the market has been doing to him, you mean." Dilke laughed. "It is a wonder he isn't wiped out; for he was caught short a month or so ago in that Mexamer Oil slump for a devil of a lot, and we expected him to go under pronto; but he managed somehow to tide himself over. He must have worked a miracle."

"He was in so deep, then?"

"Deep? He's been playing the wrong side of the market almost steadily for the past six months. Odd, too; he's a pretty shrewd operator as a rule, but roughly speaking, I should say he had lost nearly half a million since the first of the year." Dilke paused, blew a smoke-ring, and regarded his friend thoughtfully. "I suppose I musn't [sic] ask what his financial condition has to do with the fact that his wife's body is to be exhumed for an autopsy and strange things are hinted concerning the death of his son?"

"Of course you may, Jim." Odell laughed. "As a matter of fact, it has no direct bearing on the case; it is what we call the routine work, getting a line on the family finances and who controls them. You're too old a bird in the newspaper game yourself to take any stock in the innuendoes of the press when we won't give out any authentic dope to fill their columns. I know it seems piking