Dark Horse

The next morning at breakfast, Albert flipped through the latest issue of The Daily Prophet and discovered that his odds had actually dropped. More precisely, the odds of him winning the Gold Prize had fallen to six-to-one. Clearly, The Daily Prophet had noticed that someone had placed a large number of Galleons on him and hurriedly lowered the odds in fright.

Even if the people at The Daily Prophet were out of their minds, once they noticed someone throwing a huge sum of Galleons into the pool, they would realize something was wrong.

So far, practically no one believed that No. 17, Albert, would win the Gold Prize for Barnabus Finkley's Exceptional Spell-Casting Techniques. Even those who had bet on him were merely small-time gamblers, and the sums were very limited.

Yet now, several people had placed bets, each putting down a large number of Galleons at once.

What did that mean? No one understood it better than the people running the betting pool.

What Albert did not know was that his odds had already been lowered three times.

The first time was when Bard had put in five hundred Galleons. Seeing that someone else was willing to stake such a large sum on No. 17 winning the Gold Prize, the organizers had promptly lowered his odds to seven-to-one in alarm.

Later, The Daily Prophet discovered that more people were successively putting in several hundred Galleons, all betting that Albert would win the Gold Prize, so they had no choice but to lower the odds again.

There was no helping it. Something strange was clearly going on.

With odds that high, if they really had to pay out, they would lose even their underwear.

"Those people are really timid." Bard folded up the newspaper and said to Albert with a