THE GOLD BAT

by P. G. Wodehouse

1904

[Dedication]

To

THAT PRINCE OF SLACKERS,

HERBERT WESTBROOK

CONTENTS

Chapter

I THE FIFTEENTH PLACE

II THE GOLD BAT

III THE MAYOR’S STATUE

IV THE LEAGUE’S WARNING

V MILL RECEIVES VISITORS

VI TREVOR REMAINS FIRM

VII “WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE”

VIII O’HARA ON THE TRACK

IX MAINLY ABOUT FERRETS

X BEING A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

XI THE HOUSE-MATCHES

XII NEWS OF THE GOLD BAT

XIII VICTIM NUMBER THREE

XIV THE WHITE FIGURE

XV A SPRAIN AND A VACANT PLACE

XVI THE RIPTON MATCH

XVII THE WATCHERS IN THE VAULT

XVIII O’HARA EXCELS HIMSELF

XIX THE MAYOR’S VISIT

XX THE FINDING OF THE BAT

XXI THE LEAGUE REVEALED

XXII A DRESS REHEARSAL

XXIII WHAT RENFORD SAW

XXIV CONCLUSION

I

THE FIFTEENTH PLACE

“Outside!”

“Don’t be an idiot, man.  I bagged
it first.”

“My dear chap, I’ve been waiting here
a month.”

“When you fellows have quite
finished rotting about in front of that bath don’t
let me detain you.”

“Anybody seen that sponge?”

“Well, look here”—­this in a
tone of compromise—­“let’s toss
for it.”

“All right.  Odd man out.”

All of which, being interpreted, meant
that the first match of the Easter term had just come
to an end, and that those of the team who, being day
boys, changed over at the pavilion, instead of performing
the operation at leisure and in comfort, as did the
members of houses, were discussing the vital question—­who
was to have first bath?

The Field Sports Committee at Wrykyn—­that
is, at the school which stood some half-mile outside
that town and took its name from it—­were
not lavish in their expenditure as regarded the changing
accommodation in the pavilion.  Letters appeared
in every second number of the Wrykinian, some
short, others long, some from members of the school,
others from Old Boys, all protesting against the condition
of the first, second, and third fifteen dressing-rooms. 
“Indignant” would inquire acidly, in half
a page of small type, if the editor happened to be
aware that there was no hair-brush in the second room,
and only half a comb.  “Disgusted O. W.”
would remark that when he came down with the Wandering
Zephyrs to play against the third fifteen, the
water supply had suddenly and mysteriously failed,
and the W.Z.’s had been obliged to go home as
they were, in a state of primeval grime, and he thought
that this was “a very bad thing in a school of
over six hundred boys”, though what the number
of boys had to do with the fact that there was no
water he omitted to explain.  The editor would
express his regret in brackets, and things would go
on as before.

There was only one bath in the first
fifteen room, and there were on the present occasion
six claimants to it.  And each claimant was of
the fixed opinion that, whatever happened subsequently,
he was going to have it first.  Finally, on the
suggestion of Otway, who had reduced tossing to a
fine art, a mystic game of Tommy Dodd was played. 
Otway having triumphantly obtained first innings,
the conversation reverted to the subject of the match.

The Easter term always opened with
a scratch game against a mixed team of masters and
old boys, and the school usually won without any great
exertion.  On this occasion the match had been
rather more even than the average, and the team had
only just pulled the thing off by a couple of tries
to a goal.  Otway expressed an opinion that the
school had played badly.

“Why on earth don’t you
forwards let the ball out occasionally?” he
asked.  Otway was one of the first fifteen halves.

“They were so jolly heavy in
the scrum,” said Maurice, one of the forwards. 
“And when we did let it out, the outsides nearly
always mucked it.”

“Well, it wasn’t the halves’
fault.  We always got it out to the centres.”

“It wasn’t the centres,”
put in Robinson.  “They played awfully well. 
Trevor was ripping.”

“Trevor always is,” said
Otway; “I should think he’s about the best
captain we’ve had here for a long time. 
He’s certainly one of the best centres.”

“Best there’s been since Rivers-Jones,”
said Clephane.

Rivers-Jones was one of those players
who mark an epoch.  He had been in the team fifteen
years ago, and had left Wrykyn to captain Cambridge
and play three years in succession for Wales. 
The school regarded the standard set by him as one
that did not admit of comparison.  However good
a Wrykyn centre three-quarter might be, the most he
could hope to be considered was “the best since
Rivers-Jones”.  “Since” Rivers-Jones,
however, covered fifteen years, and to be looked on
as the best centre the school could boast of during
that time, meant something.  For Wrykyn knew how
to play football.

Since it had been decided thus that
the faults in the school attack did not lie with the
halves, forwards, or centres, it was more or less
evident that they must be attributable to the wings. 
And the search for the weak spot was even further
narrowed down by the general verdict that Clowes,
on the left wing, had played well.  With a beautiful
unanimity the six occupants of the first fifteen room
came to the conclusion that the man who had let the
team down that day had been the man on the right—­Rand-Brown,
to wit, of Seymour’s.

“I’ll bet he doesn’t
stay in the first long,” said Clephane, who was
now in the bath, vice Otway, retired.  “I
suppose they had to try him, as he was the senior
wing three-quarter of the second, but he’s no
earthly good.”

“He only got into the second
because he’s big,” was Robinson’s
opinion.  “A man who’s big and strong
can always get his second colours.”

“Even if he’s a funk,
like Rand-Brown,” said Clephane.  “Did
any of you chaps notice the way he let Paget through
that time he scored for them?  He simply didn’t
attempt to tackle him.  He could have brought him
down like a shot if he’d only gone for him. 
Paget was running straight along the touch-line, and
hadn’t any room to dodge.  I know Trevor
was jolly sick about it.  And then he let him
through once before in just the same way in the first
half, only Trevor got round and stopped him.  He
was rank.”

“Missed every other pass, too,” said Otway.

Clephane summed up.

“He was rank,” he said again.  “Trevor
won’t keep him in the team long.”

“I wish Paget hadn’t left,”
said Otway, referring to the wing three-quarter who,
by leaving unexpectedly at the end of the Christmas
term, had let Rand-Brown into the team.  His loss
was likely to be felt.  Up till Christmas Wrykyn
had done well, and Paget had been their scoring man. 
Rand-Brown had occupied a similar position in the second
fifteen.  He was big and speedy, and in second
fifteen matches these qualities make up for a great
deal.  If a man scores one or two tries in nearly
every match, people are inclined to overlook in him
such failings as timidity and clumsiness.  It
is only when he comes to be tried in football of a
higher class that he is seen through.  In the second
fifteen the fact that Rand-Brown was afraid to tackle
his man had almost escaped notice.  But the habit
would not do in first fifteen circles.

“All the same,” said Clephane,
pursuing his subject, “if they don’t play
him, I don’t see who they’re going to get. 
He’s the best of the second three-quarters,
as far as I can see.”

It was this very problem that was
puzzling Trevor, as he walked off the field with Paget
and Clowes, when they had got into their blazers after
the match.  Clowes was in the same house as Trevor—­Donaldson’s—­and
Paget was staying there, too.  He had been head
of Donaldson’s up to Christmas.

“It strikes me,” said
Paget, “the school haven’t got over the
holidays yet.  I never saw such a lot of slackers. 
You ought to have taken thirty points off the sort
of team you had against you today.”

“Have you ever known the school
play well on the second day of term?” asked
Clowes.  “The forwards always play as if
the whole thing bored them to death.”

“It wasn’t the forwards
that mattered so much,” said Trevor.  “They’ll
shake down all right after a few matches.  A little
running and passing will put them right.”

“Let’s hope so,”
Paget observed, “or we might as well scratch
to Ripton at once.  There’s a jolly sight
too much of the mince-pie and Christmas pudding about
their play at present.”  There was a pause. 
Then Paget brought out the question towards which
he had been moving all the time.

“What do you think of Rand-Brown?” he
asked.

It was pretty clear by the way he
spoke what he thought of that player himself, but
in discussing with a football captain the capabilities
of the various members of his team, it is best to
avoid a too positive statement one way or the other
before one has heard his views on the subject. 
And Paget was one of those people who like to know
the opinions of others before committing themselves.

Clowes, on the other hand, was in
the habit of forming his views on his own account,
and expressing them.  If people agreed with them,
well and good:  it afforded strong presumptive
evidence of their sanity.  If they disagreed,
it was unfortunate, but he was not going to alter his
opinions for that, unless convinced at great length
that they were unsound.  He summed things up,
and gave you the result.  You could take it or
leave it, as you preferred.

“I thought he was bad,” said Clowes.

“Bad!” exclaimed Trevor,
“he was a disgrace.  One can understand a
chap having his off-days at any game, but one doesn’t
expect a man in the Wrykyn first to funk.  He
mucked five out of every six passes I gave him, too,
and the ball wasn’t a bit slippery.  Still,
I shouldn’t mind that so much if he had only
gone for his man properly.  It isn’t being
out of practice that makes you funk.  And even
when he did have a try at you, Paget, he always went
high.”

“That,” said Clowes thoughtfully,
“would seem to show that he was game.”

Nobody so much as smiled.  Nobody
ever did smile at Clowes’ essays in wit, perhaps
because of the solemn, almost sad, tone of voice in
which he delivered them.  He was tall and dark
and thin, and had a pensive eye, which encouraged
the more soulful of his female relatives to entertain
hopes that he would some day take orders.

“Well,” said Paget, relieved
at finding that he did not stand alone in his views
on Rand-Brown’s performance, “I must say
I thought he was awfully bad myself.”

“I shall try somebody else next
match,” said Trevor.  “It’ll
be rather hard, though.  The man one would naturally
put in, Bryce, left at Christmas, worse luck.”

Bryce was the other wing three-quarter
of the second fifteen.

“Isn’t there anybody in the third?”
asked Paget.

“Barry,” said Clowes briefly.

“Clowes thinks Barry’s good,” explained
Trevor.

“He is good,” said
Clowes.  “I admit he’s small, but he
can tackle.”

“The question is, would he be
any good in the first?  A chap might do jolly
well for the third, and still not be worth trying for
the first.”

“I don’t remember much
about Barry,” said Paget, “except being
collared by him when we played Seymour’s last
year in the final.  I certainly came away with
a sort of impression that he could tackle.  I thought
he marked me jolly well.”

“There you are, then,”
said Clowes.  “A year ago Barry could tackle
Paget.  There’s no reason for supposing that
he’s fallen off since then.  We’ve
seen that Rand-Brown can’t tackle Paget. 
Ergo, Barry is better worth playing for the team than
Rand-Brown.  Q.E.D.”

“All right, then,” replied
Trevor.  “There can’t be any harm in
trying him.  We’ll have another scratch
game on Thursday.  Will you be here then, Paget?”

“Oh, yes.  I’m stopping till Saturday.”

“Good man.  Then we shall
be able to see how he does against you.  I wish
you hadn’t left, though, by Jove.  We should
have had Ripton on toast, the same as last term.”

Wrykyn played five schools, but six
school matches.  The school that they played twice
in the season was Ripton.  To win one Ripton match
meant that, however many losses it might have sustained
in the other matches, the school had had, at any rate,
a passable season.  To win two Ripton matches
in the same year was almost unheard of.  This year
there had seemed every likelihood of it.  The
match before Christmas on the Ripton ground had resulted
in a win for Wrykyn by two goals and a try to a try. 
But the calculations of the school had been upset by
the sudden departure of Paget at the end of term,
and also of Bryce, who had hitherto been regarded
as his understudy.  And in the first Ripton match
the two goals had both been scored by Paget, and both
had been brilliant bits of individual play, which
a lesser man could not have carried through.

The conclusion, therefore, at which
the school reluctantly arrived, was that their chances
of winning the second match could not be judged by
their previous success.  They would have to approach
the Easter term fixture from another—­a
non-Paget—­standpoint.  In these circumstances
it became a serious problem:  who was to get the
fifteenth place?  Whoever played in Paget’s
stead against Ripton would be certain, if the match
were won, to receive his colours.  Who, then, would
fill the vacancy?

“Rand-Brown, of course,” said the crowd.

But the experts, as we have shown, were of a different
opinion.

II

THE GOLD BAT

Trevor did not take long to resume
a garb of civilisation.  He never wasted much
time over anything.  He was gifted with a boundless
energy, which might possibly have made him unpopular
had he not justified it by results.  The football
of the school had never been in such a flourishing
condition as it had attained to on his succeeding to
the captaincy.  It was not only that the first
fifteen was good.  The excellence of a first fifteen
does not always depend on the captain.  But the
games, even down to the very humblest junior game,
had woken up one morning—­at the beginning
of the previous term—­to find themselves,
much to their surprise, organised going concerns. 
Like the immortal Captain Pott, Trevor was “a
terror to the shirker and the lubber”.  And
the resemblance was further increased by the fact that
he was “a toughish lot”, who was “little,
but steel and india-rubber”.  At first sight
his appearance was not imposing.  Paterfamilias,
who had heard his son’s eulogies on Trevor’s
performances during the holidays, and came down to
watch the school play a match, was generally rather
disappointed on seeing five feet six where he had looked
for at least six foot one, and ten stone where he
had expected thirteen.  But then, what there was
of Trevor was, as previously remarked, steel and india-rubber,
and he certainly played football like a miniature
Stoddart.  It was characteristic of him that, though
this was the first match of the term, his condition
seemed to be as good as possible.  He had done
all his own work on the field and most of Rand-Brown’s,
and apparently had not turned a hair.  He was one
of those conscientious people who train in the holidays.

When he had changed, he went down
the passage to Clowes’ study.  Clowes was
in the position he frequently took up when the weather
was good—­wedged into his window in a sitting
position, one leg in the study, the other hanging
outside over space.  The indoor leg lacked a boot,
so that it was evident that its owner had at least
had the energy to begin to change.  That he had
given the thing up after that, exhausted with the effort,
was what one naturally expected from Clowes. 
He would have made a splendid actor:  he was so
good at resting.

“Hurry up and dress,”
said Trevor; “I want you to come over to the
baths.”

“What on earth do you want over at the baths?”

“I want to see O’Hara.”

“Oh, yes, I remember.  Dexter’s
are camping out there, aren’t they?  I heard
they were.  Why is it?”

“One of the Dexter kids got
measles in the last week of the holidays, so they
shunted all the beds and things across, and the chaps
went back there instead of to the house.”

In the winter term the baths were
always boarded over and converted into a sort of extra
gymnasium where you could go and box or fence when
there was no room to do it in the real gymnasium. 
Socker and stump-cricket were also largely played
there, the floor being admirably suited to such games,
though the light was always rather tricky, and prevented
heavy scoring.

“I should think,” said
Clowes, “from what I’ve seen of Dexter’s
beauties, that Dexter would like them to camp out at
the bottom of the baths all the year round.  It
would be a happy release for him if they were all
drowned.  And I suppose if he had to choose any
one of them for a violent death, he’d pick O’Hara. 
O’Hara must be a boon to a house-master. 
I’ve known chaps break rules when the spirit
moved them, but he’s the only one I’ve
met who breaks them all day long and well into the
night simply for amusement.  I’ve often thought
of writing to the S.P.C.A. about it.  I suppose
you could call Dexter an animal all right?”

“O’Hara’s right
enough, really.  A man like Dexter would make any
fellow run amuck.  And then O’Hara’s
an Irishman to start with, which makes a difference.”

There is usually one house in every
school of the black sheep sort, and, if you go to
the root of the matter, you will generally find that
the fault is with the master of that house.  A
house-master who enters into the life of his house,
coaches them in games—­if an athlete—­or,
if not an athlete, watches the games, umpiring at cricket
and refereeing at football, never finds much difficulty
in keeping order.  It may be accepted as fact
that the juniors of a house will never be orderly
of their own free will, but disturbances in the junior
day-room do not make the house undisciplined. 
The prefects are the criterion.  If you find them
joining in the general “rags”, and even
starting private ones on their own account, then you
may safely say that it is time the master of that
house retired from the business, and took to chicken-farming. 
And that was the state of things in Dexter’s. 
It was the most lawless of the houses.  Mr Dexter
belonged to a type of master almost unknown at a public
school—­the usher type.  In a private
school he might have passed.  At Wrykyn he was
out of place.  To him the whole duty of a house-master
appeared to be to wage war against his house.

When Dexter’s won the final
for the cricket cup in the summer term of two years
back, the match lasted four afternoons—­four
solid afternoons of glorious, up-and-down cricket. 
Mr Dexter did not see a single ball of that match
bowled.  He was prowling in sequestered lanes and
broken-down barns out of bounds on the off-chance
that he might catch some member of his house smoking
there.  As if the whole of the house, from the
head to the smallest fag, were not on the field watching
Day’s best bats collapse before Henderson’s
bowling, and Moriarty hit up that marvellous and unexpected
fifty-three at the end of the second innings!

That sort of thing definitely stamps a master.

“What do you want to see O’Hara about?”
asked Clowes.

“He’s got my little gold bat.  I lent
it him in the holidays.”

A remark which needs a footnote. 
The bat referred to was made of gold, and was about
an inch long by an eighth broad.  It had come into
existence some ten years previously, in the following
manner.  The inter-house cricket cup at Wrykyn
had originally been a rather tarnished and unimpressive
vessel, whose only merit consisted in the fact that
it was of silver.  Ten years ago an Old Wrykinian,
suddenly reflecting that it would not be a bad idea
to do something for the school in a small way, hied
him to the nearest jeweller’s and purchased
another silver cup, vast withal and cunningly decorated
with filigree work, and standing on a massive ebony
plinth, round which were little silver lozenges just
big enough to hold the name of the winning house and
the year of grace.  This he presented with his
blessing to be competed for by the dozen houses that
made up the school of Wrykyn, and it was formally
established as the house cricket cup.  The question
now arose:  what was to be done with the other
cup?  The School House, who happened to be the
holders at the time, suggested disinterestedly that
it should become the property of the house which had
won it last.  “Not so,” replied the
Field Sports Committee, “but far otherwise. 
We will have it melted down in a fiery furnace, and
thereafter fashioned into eleven little silver bats. 
And these little silver bats shall be the guerdon
of the eleven members of the winning team, to have
and to hold for the space of one year, unless, by
winning the cup twice in succession, they gain the
right of keeping the bat for yet another year. 
How is that, umpire?” And the authorities replied,
“O men of infinite resource and sagacity, verily
is it a cold day when you get left behind. 
Forge ahead.”  But, when they had forged
ahead, behold! it would not run to eleven little silver
bats, but only to ten little silver bats.  Thereupon
the headmaster, a man liberal with his cash, caused
an eleventh little bat to be fashioned—­for
the captain of the winning team to have and to hold
in the manner aforesaid.  And, to single it out
from the others, it was wrought, not of silver, but
of gold.  And so it came to pass that at the time
of our story Trevor was in possession of the little
gold bat, because Donaldson’s had won the cup
in the previous summer, and he had captained them—­and,
incidentally, had scored seventy-five without a mistake.

“Well, I’m hanged if I
would trust O’Hara with my bat,” said Clowes,
referring to the silver ornament on his own watch-chain;
“he’s probably pawned yours in the holidays. 
Why did you lend it to him?”

“His people wanted to see it. 
I know him at home, you know.  They asked me to
lunch the last day but one of the holidays, and we
got talking about the bat, because, of course, if
we hadn’t beaten Dexter’s in the final,
O’Hara would have had it himself.  So I sent
it over next day with a note asking O’Hara to
bring it back with him here.”

“Oh, well, there’s a chance,
then, seeing he’s only had it so little time,
that he hasn’t pawned it yet.  You’d
better rush off and get it back as soon as possible. 
It’s no good waiting for me.  I shan’t
be ready for weeks.”

“Where’s Paget?”

“Teaing with Donaldson.  At least, he said
he was going to.”

“Then I suppose I shall have to go alone. 
I hate walking alone.”

“If you hurry,” said Clowes,
scanning the road from his post of vantage, “you’ll
be able to go with your fascinating pal Ruthven. 
He’s just gone out.”

Trevor dashed downstairs in his energetic
way, and overtook the youth referred to.

Clowes brooded over them from above
like a sorrowful and rather disgusted Providence. 
Trevor’s liking for Ruthven, who was a Donaldsonite
like himself, was one of the few points on which the
two had any real disagreement.  Clowes could not
understand how any person in his senses could of his
own free will make an intimate friend of Ruthven.

“Hullo, Trevor,” said Ruthven.

“Come over to the baths,”
said Trevor, “I want to see O’Hara about
something.  Or were you going somewhere else.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere
in particular.  I never know what to do in term-time. 
It’s deadly dull.”

Trevor could never understand how
any one could find term-time dull.  For his own
part, there always seemed too much to do in the time.

“You aren’t allowed to
play games?” he said, remembering something
about a doctor’s certificate in the past.

“No,” said Ruthven.  “Thank
goodness,” he added.

Which remark silenced Trevor. 
To a person who thanked goodness that he was not allowed
to play games he could find nothing to say.  But
he ceased to wonder how it was that Ruthven was dull.

They proceeded to the baths together
in silence.  O’Hara, they were informed
by a Dexter’s fag who met them outside the door,
was not about.

“When he comes back,”
said Trevor, “tell him I want him to come to
tea tomorrow directly after school, and bring my bat. 
Don’t forget.”

The fag promised to make a point of it.

III

THE MAYOR’S STATUE

One of the rules that governed the
life of Donough O’Hara, the light-hearted descendant
of the O’Haras of Castle Taterfields, Co. 
Clare, Ireland, was “Never refuse the offer of
a free tea”.  So, on receipt—­per
the Dexter’s fag referred to—­of Trevor’s
invitation, he scratched one engagement (with his
mathematical master—­not wholly unconnected
with the working-out of Examples 200 to 206 in Hall
and Knight’s Algebra), postponed another (with
his friend and ally Moriarty, of Dexter’s, who
wished to box with him in the gymnasium), and made
his way at a leisurely pace towards Donaldson’s. 
He was feeling particularly pleased with himself today,
for several reasons.  He had begun the day well
by scoring brilliantly off Mr Dexter across the matutinal
rasher and coffee.  In morning school he had been
put on to translate the one passage which he happened
to have prepared—­the first ten lines, in
fact, of the hundred which formed the morning’s
lesson.  And in the final hour of afternoon school,
which was devoted to French, he had discovered and
exploited with great success an entirely new and original
form of ragging.  This, he felt, was the strenuous
life; this was living one’s life as one’s
life should be lived.

He met Trevor at the gate.  As
they were going in, a carriage and pair dashed past. 
Its cargo consisted of two people, the headmaster,
looking bored, and a small, dapper man, with a very
red face, who looked excited, and was talking volubly. 
Trevor and O’Hara raised their caps as the chariot
swept by, but the salute passed unnoticed.  The
Head appeared to be wrapped in thought.

“What’s the Old Man doing
in a carriage, I wonder,” said Trevor, looking
after them.  “Who’s that with him?”

“That,” said O’Hara, “is Sir
Eustace Briggs.”

“Who’s Sir Eustace Briggs?”

O’Hara explained, in a rich
brogue, that Sir Eustace was Mayor of Wrykyn, a keen
politician, and a hater of the Irish nation, judging
by his letters and speeches.

They went into Trevor’s study. 
Clowes was occupying the window in his usual manner.

“Hullo, O’Hara,”
he said, “there is an air of quiet satisfaction
about you that seems to show that you’ve been
ragging Dexter.  Have you?”

“Oh, that was only this morning
at breakfast.  The best rag was in French,”
replied O’Hara, who then proceeded to explain
in detail the methods he had employed to embitter
the existence of the hapless Gallic exile with whom
he had come in contact.  It was that gentleman’s
custom to sit on a certain desk while conducting the
lesson.  This desk chanced to be O’Hara’s. 
On the principle that a man may do what he likes with
his own, he had entered the room privily in the dinner-hour,
and removed the screws from his desk, with the result
that for the first half-hour of the lesson the class
had been occupied in excavating M. Gandinois from
the ruins.  That gentleman’s first act on
regaining his equilibrium had been to send O’Hara
out of the room, and O’Hara, who had foreseen
this emergency, had spent a very pleasant half-hour
in the passage with some mixed chocolates and a copy
of Mr Hornung’s Amateur Cracksman. 
It was his notion of a cheerful and instructive French
lesson.

“What were you talking about
when you came in?” asked Clowes.  “Who’s
been slanging Ireland, O’Hara?”

“The man Briggs.”

“What are you going to do about
it?  Aren’t you going to take any steps?”

“Is it steps?” said O’Hara, warmly,
“and haven’t we——­”

He stopped.

“Well?”

“Ye know,” he said, seriously,
“ye mustn’t let it go any further. 
I shall get sacked if it’s found out.  An’
so will Moriarty, too.”

“Why?” asked Trevor, looking
up from the tea-pot he was filling, “what on
earth have you been doing?”

“Wouldn’t it be rather
a cheery idea,” suggested Clowes, “if you
began at the beginning.”

“Well, ye see,” O’Hara
began, “it was this way.  The first I heard
of it was from Dexter.  He was trying to score
off me as usual, an’ he said, ‘Have ye
seen the paper this morning, O’Hara?’ I
said, no, I had not.  Then he said, ‘Ah,’
he said, ’ye should look at it.  There’s
something there that ye’ll find interesting.’ 
I said, ‘Yes, sir?’ in me respectful way. 
‘Yes,’ said he, ’the Irish members
have been making their customary disturbances in the
House.  Why is it, O’Hara,’ he said,
’that Irishmen are always thrusting themselves
forward and making disturbances for purposes of self-advertisement?’
‘Why, indeed, sir?’ said I, not knowing
what else to say, and after that the conversation
ceased.”

“Go on,” said Clowes.

“After breakfast Moriarty came
to me with a paper, and showed me what they had been
saying about the Irish.  There was a letter from
the man Briggs on the subject.  ’A very
sensible and temperate letter from Sir Eustace Briggs’,
they called it, but bedad! if that was a temperate
letter, I should like to know what an intemperate one
is.  Well, we read it through, and Moriarty said
to me, ‘Can we let this stay as it is?’
And I said, ‘No.  We can’t.’ 
‘Well,’ said Moriarty to me, ’what
are we to do about it?  I should like to tar and
feather the man,’ he said.  ’We can’t
do that,’ I said, ‘but why not tar and
feather his statue?’ I said.  So we thought
we would.  Ye know where the statue is, I suppose? 
It’s in the recreation ground just across the
river.”

“I know the place,” said
Clowes.  “Go on.  This is ripping. 
I always knew you were pretty mad, but this sounds
as if it were going to beat all previous records.”

“Have ye seen the baths this
term,” continued O’Hara, “since they
shifted Dexter’s house into them?  The beds
are in two long rows along each wall.  Moriarty’s
and mine are the last two at the end farthest from
the door.”

“Just under the gallery,” said Trevor. 
“I see.”

“That’s it.  Well,
at half-past ten sharp every night Dexter sees that
we’re all in, locks the door, and goes off to
sleep at the Old Man’s, and we don’t see
him again till breakfast.  He turns the gas off
from outside.  At half-past seven the next morning,
Smith”—­Smith was one of the school
porters—­“unlocks the door and calls
us, and we go over to the Hall to breakfast.”

“Well?”

“Well, directly everybody was
asleep last night—­it wasn’t till after
one, as there was a rag on—­Moriarty and
I got up, dressed, and climbed up into the gallery. 
Ye know the gallery windows?  They open at the
top, an’ it’s rather hard to get out of
them.  But we managed it, and dropped on to the
gravel outside.”

“Long drop,” said Clowes.

“Yes.  I hurt myself rather. 
But it was in a good cause.  I dropped first,
and while I was on the ground, Moriarty came on top
of me.  That’s how I got hurt.  But
it wasn’t much, and we cut across the grounds,
and over the fence, and down to the river.  It
was a fine night, and not very dark, and everything
smelt ripping down by the river.”

“Don’t get poetical,” said Clowes. 
“Stick to the point.”

“We got into the boat-house—­”

“How?” asked the practical
Trevor, for the boat-house was wont to be locked at
one in the morning.  “Moriarty had a key
that fitted,” explained O’Hara, briefly. 
“We got in, and launched a boat—­a
big tub—­put in the tar and a couple of
brushes—­there’s always tar in the
boat-house—­and rowed across.”

“Wait a bit,” interrupted
Trevor, “you said tar and feathers.  Where
did you get the feathers?”

“We used leaves.  They do
just as well, and there were heaps on the bank. 
Well, when we landed, we tied up the boat, and bucked
across to the Recreation Ground.  We got over
the railings—­beastly, spiky railings—­and
went over to the statue.  Ye know where the statue
stands?  It’s right in the middle of the
place, where everybody can see it.  Moriarty got
up first, and I handed him the tar and a brush. 
Then I went up with the other brush, and we began. 
We did his face first.  It was too dark to see
really well, but I think we made a good job of it. 
When we had put about as much tar on as we thought
would do, we took out the leaves—­which
we were carrying in our pockets—­and spread
them on.  Then we did the rest of him, and after
about half an hour, when we thought we’d done
about enough, we got into our boat again, and came
back.”

“And what did you do till half-past seven?”

“We couldn’t get back the way we’d
come, so we slept in the boat-house.”

“Well—­I’m—­hanged,”
was Trevor’s comment on the story.

Clowes roared with laughter.  O’Hara was
a perpetual joy to him.

As O’Hara was going, Trevor asked him for his
gold bat.

“You haven’t lost it, I hope?” he
said.

O’Hara felt in his pocket, but
brought his hand out at once and transferred it to
another pocket.  A look of anxiety came over his
face, and was reflected in Trevor’s.

“I could have sworn it was in that pocket,”
he said.

“You haven’t lost it?” queried
Trevor again.

“He has,” said Clowes,
confidently.  “If you want to know where
that bat is, I should say you’d find it somewhere
between the baths and the statue.  At the foot
of the statue, for choice.  It seems to me—­correct
me if I am wrong—­that you have been and
gone and done it, me broth av a bhoy.”

O’Hara gave up the search.

“It’s gone,” he
said.  “Man, I’m most awfully sorry. 
I’d sooner have lost a ten-pound note.”

“I don’t see why you should
lose either,” snapped Trevor.  “Why
the blazes can’t you be more careful.”

O’Hara was too penitent for
words.  Clowes took it on himself to point out
the bright side.

“There’s nothing to get
sick about, really,” he said.  “If
the thing doesn’t turn up, though it probably
will, you’ll simply have to tell the Old Man
that it’s lost.  He’ll have another
made.  You won’t be asked for it till just
before Sports Day either, so you will have plenty of
time to find it.”

The challenge cups, and also the bats,
had to be given to the authorities before the sports,
to be formally presented on Sports Day.

“Oh, I suppose it’ll be
all right,” said Trevor, “but I hope it
won’t be found anywhere near the statue.”

O’Hara said he hoped so too.

IV

THE LEAGUE’S WARNING

The team to play in any match was
always put upon the notice-board at the foot of the
stairs in the senior block a day before the date of
the fixture.  Both first and second fifteens had
matches on the Thursday of this week.  The second
were playing a team brought down by an old Wrykinian. 
The first had a scratch game.

When Barry, accompanied by M’Todd,
who shared his study at Seymour’s and rarely
left him for two minutes on end, passed by the notice-board
at the quarter to eleven interval, it was to the second
fifteen list that he turned his attention.  Now
that Bryce had left, he thought he might have a chance
of getting into the second.  His only real rival,
he considered, was Crawford, of the School House,
who was the other wing three-quarter of the third
fifteen.  The first name he saw on the list was
Crawford’s.  It seemed to be written twice
as large as any of the others, and his own was nowhere
to be seen.  The fact that he had half expected
the calamity made things no better.  He had set
his heart on playing for the second this term.

Then suddenly he noticed a remarkable
phenomenon.  The other wing three-quarter was
Rand-Brown.  If Rand-Brown was playing for the
second, who was playing for the first?

He looked at the list.

“Come on,” he said
hastily to M’Todd.  He wanted to get away
somewhere where his agitated condition would not be
noticed.  He felt quite faint at the shock of
seeing his name on the list of the first fifteen. 
There it was, however, as large as life.  “M. 
Barry.”  Separated from the rest by a thin
red line, but still there.  In his most optimistic
moments he had never dreamed of this.  M’Todd
was reading slowly through the list of the second. 
He did everything slowly, except eating.

“Come on,” said Barry again.

M’Todd had, after much deliberation,
arrived at a profound truth.  He turned to Barry,
and imparted his discovery to him in the weighty manner
of one who realises the importance of his words.

“Look here,” he said, “your name’s
not down here.”

“I know. Come on.”

“But that means you’re not playing for
the second.”

“Of course it does.  Well, if you aren’t
coming, I’m off.”

“But, look here——­”

Barry disappeared through the door. 
After a moment’s pause, M’Todd followed
him.  He came up with him on the senior gravel.

“What’s up?” he inquired.

“Nothing,” said Barry.

“Are you sick about not playing for the second?”

“No.”

“You are, really.  Come and have a bun.”

In the philosophy of M’Todd
it was indeed a deep-rooted sorrow that could not
be cured by the internal application of a new, hot
bun.  It had never failed in his own case.

“Bun!” Barry was quite
shocked at the suggestion.  “I can’t
afford to get myself out of condition with beastly
buns.”

“But if you aren’t playing——­”

“You ass.  I’m playing for the first. 
Now, do you see?”

M’Todd gaped.  His mind
never worked very rapidly.  “What about
Rand-Brown, then?” he said.

“Rand-Brown’s been chucked
out.  Can’t you understand?  You are
an idiot.  Rand-Brown’s playing for the
second, and I’m playing for the first.”

“But you’re——­”

He stopped.  He had been going
to point out that Barry’s tender years—­he
was only sixteen—­and smallness would make
it impossible for him to play with success for the
first fifteen.  He refrained owing to a conviction
that the remark would not be wholly judicious. 
Barry was touchy on the subject of his size, and M’Todd
had suffered before now for commenting on it in a
disparaging spirit.

“I tell you what we’ll
do after school,” said Barry, “we’ll
have some running and passing.  It’ll do
you a lot of good, and I want to practise taking passes
at full speed.  You can trot along at your ordinary
pace, and I’ll sprint up from behind.”

M’Todd saw no objection to that. 
Trotting along at his ordinary pace—­five
miles an hour—­would just suit him.

“Then after that,” continued
Barry, with a look of enthusiasm, “I want to
practise passing back to my centre.  Paget used
to do it awfully well last term, and I know Trevor
expects his wing to.  So I’ll buck along,
and you race up to take my pass.  See?”

This was not in M’Todd’s
line at all.  He proposed a slight alteration
in the scheme.

“Hadn’t you better get somebody else—?”
he began.

“Don’t be a slack beast,”
said Barry.  “You want exercise awfully
badly.”

And, as M’Todd always did exactly
as Barry wished, he gave in, and spent from four-thirty
to five that afternoon in the prescribed manner. 
A suggestion on his part at five sharp that it wouldn’t
be a bad idea to go and have some tea was not favourably
received by the enthusiastic three-quarter, who proposed
to devote what time remained before lock-up to practising
drop-kicking.  It was a painful alternative that
faced M’Todd.  His allegiance to Barry demanded
that he should consent to the scheme.  On the
other hand, his allegiance to afternoon tea—­equally
strong—­called him back to the house, where
there was cake, and also muffins.  In the end
the question was solved by the appearance of Drummond,
of Seymour’s, garbed in football things, and
also anxious to practise drop-kicking.  So M’Todd
was dismissed to his tea with opprobrious epithets,
and Barry and Drummond settled down to a little serious
and scientific work.

Making allowances for the inevitable
attack of nerves that attends a first appearance in
higher football circles than one is accustomed to,
Barry did well against the scratch team—­certainly
far better than Rand-Brown had done.  His smallness
was, of course, against him, and, on the only occasion
on which he really got away, Paget overtook him and
brought him down.  But then Paget was exceptionally
fast.  In the two most important branches of the
game, the taking of passes and tackling, Barry did
well.  As far as pluck went he had enough for two,
and when the whistle blew for no-side he had not let
Paget through once, and Trevor felt that his inclusion
in the team had been justified.  There was another
scratch game on the Saturday.  Barry played in
it, and did much better.  Paget had gone away
by an early train, and the man he had to mark now
was one of the masters, who had been good in his time,
but was getting a trifle old for football.  Barry
scored twice, and on one occasion, by passing back
to Trevor after the manner of Paget, enabled the captain
to run in.  And Trevor, like the captain in Billy
Taylor, “werry much approved of what he’d
done.”  Barry began to be regarded in the
school as a regular member of the fifteen.  The
first of the fixture-card matches, versus the Town,
was due on the following Saturday, and it was generally
expected that he would play.  M’Todd’s
devotion increased every day.  He even went to
the length of taking long runs with him.  And
if there was one thing in the world that M’Todd
loathed, it was a long run.

On the Thursday before the match against
the Town, Clowes came chuckling to Trevor’s
study after preparation, and asked him if he had heard
the latest.

“Have you ever heard of the League?” he
said.

Trevor pondered.

“I don’t think so,” he replied.

“How long have you been at the school?”

“Let’s see.  It’ll be five years
at the end of the summer term.”

“Ah, then you wouldn’t
remember.  I’ve been here a couple of terms
longer than you, and the row about the League was in
my first term.”

“What was the row?”

“Oh, only some chaps formed
a sort of secret society in the place.  Kind of
Vehmgericht, you know.  If they got their knife
into any one, he usually got beans, and could never
find out where they came from.  At first, as a
matter of fact, the thing was quite a philanthropical
concern.  There used to be a good deal of bullying
in the place then—­at least, in some of
the houses—­and, as the prefects couldn’t
or wouldn’t stop it, some fellows started this
League.”

“Did it work?”

“Work!  By Jove, I should
think it did.  Chaps who previously couldn’t
get through the day without making some wretched kid’s
life not worth living used to go about as nervous
as cats, looking over their shoulders every other
second.  There was one man in particular, a chap
called Leigh.  He was hauled out of bed one night,
blindfolded, and ducked in a cold bath.  He was
in the School House.”

“Why did the League bust up?”

“Well, partly because the fellows
left, but chiefly because they didn’t stick
to the philanthropist idea.  If anybody did anything
they didn’t like, they used to go for him. 
At last they put their foot into it badly.  A
chap called Robinson—­in this house by the
way—­offended them in some way, and one
morning he was found tied up in the bath, up to his
neck in cold water.  Apparently he’d been
there about an hour.  He got pneumonia, and almost
died, and then the authorities began to get going. 
Robinson thought he had recognised the voice of one
of the chaps—­I forget his name.  The
chap was had up by the Old Man, and gave the show
away entirely.  About a dozen fellows were sacked,
clean off the reel.  Since then the thing has
been dropped.”

“But what about it?  What were you going
to say when you came in?”

“Why, it’s been revived!”

“Rot!”

“It’s a fact.  Do you know Mill, a
prefect, in Seymour’s?”

“Only by sight.”

“I met him just now.  He’s
in a raving condition.  His study’s been
wrecked.  You never saw such a sight.  Everything
upside down or smashed.  He has been showing me
the ruins.”

“I believe Mill is awfully barred
in Seymour’s,” said Trevor.  “Anybody
might have ragged his study.”

“That’s just what I thought. 
He’s just the sort of man the League used to
go for.”

“That doesn’t prove that
it’s been revived, all the same,” objected
Trevor.

“No, friend; but this does. 
Mill found it tied to a chair.”

It was a small card.  It looked
like an ordinary visiting card.  On it, in neat
print, were the words, “With the compliments
of the League”.

“That’s exactly the same
sort of card as they used to use,” said Clowes. 
“I’ve seen some of them.  What do you
think of that?”

“I think whoever has started
the thing is a pretty average-sized idiot.  He’s
bound to get caught some time or other, and then out
he goes.  The Old Man wouldn’t think twice
about sacking a chap of that sort.”

“A chap of that sort,”
said Clowes, “will take jolly good care he isn’t
caught.  But it’s rather sport, isn’t
it?”

And he went off to his study.

Next day there was further evidence
that the League was an actual going concern. 
When Trevor came down to breakfast, he found a letter
by his plate.  It was printed, as the card had
been.  It was signed “The President of the
League.”  And the purport of it was that
the League did not wish Barry to continue to play
for the first fifteen.

V

MILL RECEIVES VISITORS

Trevor’s first idea was that
somebody had sent the letter for a joke,—­Clowes
for choice.

He sounded him on the subject after breakfast.

“Did you send me that letter?”
he inquired, when Clowes came into his study to borrow
a Sportsman.

“What letter?  Did you send
the team for tomorrow up to the sporter?  I wonder
what sort of a lot the Town are bringing.”

“About not giving Barry his footer colours?”

Clowes was reading the paper.

“Giving whom?” he asked.

“Barry.  Can’t you listen?”

“Giving him what?”

“Footer colours.”

“What about them?”

Trevor sprang at the paper, and tore
it away from him.  After which he sat on the fragments.

“Did you send me a letter about not giving Barry
his footer colours?”

Clowes surveyed him with the air of
a nurse to whom the family baby has just said some
more than usually good thing.

“Don’t stop,” he said, “I
could listen all day.”

Trevor felt in his pocket for the
note, and flung it at him.  Clowes picked it up,
and read it gravely.

“What are footer colours?” he asked.

“Well,” said Trevor, “it’s
a pretty rotten sort of joke, whoever sent it. 
You haven’t said yet whether you did or not.”

“What earthly reason should
I have for sending it?  And I think you’re
making a mistake if you think this is meant as a joke.”

“You don’t really believe this League
rot?”

“You didn’t see Mill’s
study ‘after treatment’.  I did. 
Anyhow, how do you account for the card I showed you?”

“But that sort of thing doesn’t happen
at school.”

“Well, it has happened, you see.”

“Who do you think did send the letter, then?”

“The President of the League.”

“And who the dickens is the President of the
League when he’s at home?”

“If I knew that, I should tell
Mill, and earn his blessing.  Not that I want
it.”

“Then, I suppose,” snorted
Trevor, “you’d suggest that on the strength
of this letter I’d better leave Barry out of
the team?”

“Satirically in brackets,” commented Clowes.

“It’s no good your jumping
on me,” he added.  “I’ve
done nothing.  All I suggest is that you’d
better keep more or less of a look-out.  If this
League’s anything like the old one, you’ll
find they’ve all sorts of ways of getting at
people they don’t love.  I shouldn’t
like to come down for a bath some morning, and find
you already in possession, tied up like Robinson. 
When they found Robinson, he was quite blue both as
to the face and speech.  He didn’t speak
very clearly, but what one could catch was well worth
hearing.  I should advise you to sleep with a
loaded revolver under your pillow.”

“The first thing I shall do is find out who
wrote this letter.”

“I should,” said Clowes, encouragingly. 
“Keep moving.”

In Seymour’s house the Mill’s
study incident formed the only theme of conversation
that morning.  Previously the sudden elevation
to the first fifteen of Barry, who was popular in
the house, at the expense of Rand-Brown, who was unpopular,
had given Seymour’s something to talk about. 
But the ragging of the study put this topic entirely
in the shade.  The study was still on view in
almost its original condition of disorder, and all
day comparative strangers flocked to see Mill in his
den, in order to inspect things.  Mill was a youth
with few friends, and it is probable that more of
his fellow-Seymourites crossed the threshold of his
study on the day after the occurrence than had visited
him in the entire course of his school career. 
Brown would come in to borrow a knife, would sweep
the room with one comprehensive glance, and depart,
to be followed at brief intervals by Smith, Robinson,
and Jones, who came respectively to learn the right
time, to borrow a book, and to ask him if he had seen
a pencil anywhere.  Towards the end of the day,
Mill would seem to have wearied somewhat of the proceedings,
as was proved when Master Thomas Renford, aged fourteen
(who fagged for Milton, the head of the house), burst
in on the thin pretence that he had mistaken the study
for that of his rightful master, and gave vent to a
prolonged whistle of surprise and satisfaction at
the sight of the ruins.  On that occasion, the
incensed owner of the dismantled study, taking a mean
advantage of the fact that he was a prefect, and so
entitled to wield the rod, produced a handy swagger-stick
from an adjacent corner, and, inviting Master Renford
to bend over, gave him six of the best to remember
him by.  Which ceremony being concluded, he kicked
him out into the passage, and Renford went down to
the junior day-room to tell his friend Harvey about
it.

“Gave me six, the cad,”
said he, “just because I had a look at his beastly
study.  Why shouldn’t I look at his study
if I like?  I’ve a jolly good mind to go
up and have another squint.”

Harvey warmly approved the scheme.

“No, I don’t think I will,”
said Renford with a yawn.  “It’s such
a fag going upstairs.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Harvey.

“And he’s such a beast, too.”

“Yes, isn’t he?” said Harvey.

“I’m jolly glad his study
has been ragged,” continued the vindictive
Renford.

“It’s jolly exciting,
isn’t it?” added Harvey.  “And
I thought this term was going to be slow.  The
Easter term generally is.”

This remark seemed to suggest a train
of thought to Renford, who made the following cryptic
observation.  “Have you seen them today?”

To the ordinary person the words would
have conveyed little meaning.  To Harvey they
appeared to teem with import.

“Yes,” he said, “I saw them early
this morning.”

“Were they all right?”

“Yes.  Splendid.”

“Good,” said Renford.

Barry’s friend Drummond was
one of those who had visited the scene of the disaster
early, before Mill’s energetic hand had repaired
the damage done, and his narrative was consequently
in some demand.

“The place was in a frightful
muck,” he said.  “Everything smashed
except the table; and ink all over the place. 
Whoever did it must have been fairly sick with him,
or he’d never have taken the trouble to do it
so thoroughly.  Made a fair old hash of things,
didn’t he, Bertie?”

“Bertie” was the form
in which the school elected to serve up the name of
De Bertini.  Raoul de Bertini was a French boy
who had come to Wrykyn in the previous term. 
Drummond’s father had met his father in Paris,
and Drummond was supposed to be looking after Bertie. 
They shared a study together.  Bertie could not
speak much English, and what he did speak was, like
Mill’s furniture, badly broken.

“Pardon?” he said.

“Doesn’t matter,”
said Drummond, “it wasn’t anything important. 
I was only appealing to you for corroborative detail
to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing
narrative.”

Bertie grinned politely.  He always
grinned when he was not quite equal to the intellectual
pressure of the conversation.  As a consequence
of which, he was generally, like Mrs Fezziwig, one
vast, substantial smile.

“I never liked Mill much,”
said Barry, “but I think it’s rather bad
luck on the man.”

“Once,” announced M’Todd,
solemnly, “he kicked me—­for making
a row in the passage.”  It was plain that
the recollection rankled.

Barry would probably have pointed
out what an excellent and praiseworthy act on Mill’s
part that had been, when Rand-Brown came in.

“Prefects’ meeting?”
he inquired.  “Or haven’t they made
you a prefect yet, M’Todd?”

M’Todd said they had not.

Nobody present liked Rand-Brown, and
they looked at him rather inquiringly, as if to ask
what he had come for.  A friend may drop in for
a chat.  An acquaintance must justify his intrusion.

Rand-Brown ignored the silent inquiry. 
He seated himself on the table, and dragged up a chair
to rest his legs on.

“Talking about Mill, of course?” he said.

“Yes,” said Drummond.  “Have
you seen his study since it happened?”

“Yes.”

Rand-Brown smiled, as if the recollection
amused him.  He was one of those people who do
not look their best when they smile.

“Playing for the first tomorrow, Barry?”

“I don’t know,” said Barry, shortly. 
“I haven’t seen the list.”

He objected to the introduction of
the topic.  It is never pleasant to have to discuss
games with the very man one has ousted from the team.

Drummond, too, seemed to feel that
the situation was an embarrassing one, for a few minutes
later he got up to go over to the gymnasium.

“Any of you chaps coming?” he asked.

Barry and M’Todd thought they would, and the
three left the room.

“Nothing like showing a man
you don’t want him, eh, Bertie?  What do
you think?” said Rand-Brown.

Bertie grinned politely.

VI

TREVOR REMAINS FIRM

The most immediate effect of telling
anybody not to do a thing is to make him do it, in
order to assert his independence.  Trevor’s
first act on receipt of the letter was to include
Barry in the team against the Town.  It was what
he would have done in any case, but, under the circumstances,
he felt a peculiar pleasure in doing it.  The incident
also had the effect of recalling to his mind the fact
that he had tried Barry in the first instance on his
own responsibility, without consulting the committee. 
The committee of the first fifteen consisted of the
two old colours who came immediately after the captain
on the list.  The powers of a committee varied
according to the determination and truculence of the
members of it.  On any definite and important
step, affecting the welfare of the fifteen, the captain
theoretically could not move without their approval. 
But if the captain happened to be strong-minded and
the committee weak, they were apt to be slightly out
of it, and the captain would develop a habit of consulting
them a day or so after he had done a thing.  He
would give a man his colours, and inform the committee
of it on the following afternoon, when the thing was
done and could not be repealed.

Trevor was accustomed to ask the advice
of his lieutenants fairly frequently.  He never
gave colours, for instance, off his own bat.  It
seemed to him that it might be as well to learn what
views Milton and Allardyce had on the subject of Barry,
and, after the Town team had gone back across the
river, defeated by a goal and a try to nil, he changed
and went over to Seymour’s to interview Milton.

Milton was in an arm-chair, watching
Renford brew tea.  His was one of the few studies
in the school in which there was an arm-chair. 
With the majority of his contemporaries, it would
only run to the portable kind that fold up.

“Come and have some tea, Trevor,” said
Milton.

“Thanks.  If there’s any going.”

“Heaps.  Is there anything to eat, Renford?”

The fag, appealed to on this important
point, pondered darkly for a moment.

“There was some cake,” he said.

“That’s all right,”
interrupted Milton, cheerfully.  “Scratch
the cake.  I ate it before the match.  Isn’t
there anything else?”

Milton had a healthy appetite.

“Then there used to be some biscuits.”

“Biscuits are off.  I finished
’em yesterday.  Look here, young Renford,
what you’d better do is cut across to the shop
and get some more cake and some more biscuits, and
tell ’em to put it down to me.  And don’t
be long.”

“A miles better idea would be
to send him over to Donaldson’s to fetch something
from my study,” suggested Trevor.  “It
isn’t nearly so far, and I’ve got heaps
of stuff.”

“Ripping.  Cut over to Donaldson’s,
young Renford.  As a matter of fact,” he
added, confidentially, when the emissary had vanished,
“I’m not half sure that the other dodge
would have worked.  They seem to think at the
shop that I’ve had about enough things on tick
lately.  I haven’t settled up for last term
yet.  I’ve spent all I’ve got on this
study.  What do you think of those photographs?”

Trevor got up and inspected them. 
They filled the mantelpiece and most of the wall above
it.  They were exclusively theatrical photographs,
and of a variety to suit all tastes.  For the
earnest student of the drama there was Sir Henry Irving
in The Bells, and Mr Martin Harvey in The
Only Way. For the admirers of the merely beautiful
there were Messrs Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell.

“Not bad,” said Trevor.  “Beastly
waste of money.”

“Waste of money!” Milton
was surprised and pained at the criticism.  “Why,
you must spend your money on something."

“Rot, I call it,” said
Trevor.  “If you want to collect something,
why don’t you collect something worth having?”

Just then Renford came back with the supplies.

“Thanks,” said Milton,
“put ’em down.  Does the billy boil,
young Renford?”

Renford asked for explanatory notes.

“You’re a bit of an ass
at times, aren’t you?” said Milton, kindly. 
“What I meant was, is the tea ready?  If
it is, you can scoot.  If it isn’t, buck
up with it.”

A sound of bubbling and a rush of
steam from the spout of the kettle proclaimed that
the billy did boil.  Renford extinguished the Etna,
and left the room, while Milton, murmuring vague formulae
about “one spoonful for each person and one
for the pot”, got out of his chair with a groan—­for
the Town match had been an energetic one—­and
began to prepare tea.

“What I really came round about—­”
began Trevor.

“Half a second.  I can’t find the
milk.”

He went to the door, and shouted for
Renford.  On that overworked youth’s appearance,
the following dialogue took place.

“Where’s the milk?”

“What milk?”

“My milk.”

“There isn’t any.” 
This in a tone not untinged with triumph, as if the
speaker realised that here was a distinct score to
him.

“No milk?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You never had any.”

“Well, just cut across—­no,
half a second.  What are you doing downstairs?”

“Having tea.”

“Then you’ve got milk.”

“Only a little.”  This apprehensively.

“Bring it up.  You can have what we leave.”

Disgusted retirement of Master Renford.

“What I really came about,” said Trevor
again, “was business.”

“Colours?” inquired Milton,
rummaging in the tin for biscuits with sugar on them. 
“Good brand of biscuit you keep, Trevor.”

“Yes.  I think we might give Alexander and
Parker their third.”

“All right.  Any others?”

“Barry his second, do you think?”

“Rather.  He played a good
game today.  He’s an improvement on Rand-Brown.”

“Glad you think so.  I was
wondering whether it was the right thing to do, chucking
Rand-Brown out after one trial like that.  But
still, if you think Barry’s better—­”

“Streets better.  I’ve
had heaps of chances of watching them and comparing
them, when they’ve been playing for the house. 
It isn’t only that Rand-Brown can’t tackle,
and Barry can.  Barry takes his passes much better,
and doesn’t lose his head when he’s pressed.”

“Just what I thought,”
said Trevor.  “Then you’d go on playing
him for the first?”

“Rather.  He’ll get
better every game, you’ll see, as he gets more
used to playing in the first three-quarter line. 
And he’s as keen as anything on getting into
the team.  Practises taking passes and that sort
of thing every day.”

“Well, he’ll get his colours if we lick
Ripton.”

“We ought to lick them. 
They’ve lost one of their forwards, Clifford,
a red-haired chap, who was good out of touch. 
I don’t know if you remember him.”

“I suppose I ought to go and
see Allardyce about these colours, now.  Good-bye.”

There was running and passing on the
Monday for every one in the three teams.  Trevor
and Clowes met Mr Seymour as they were returning. 
Mr Seymour was the football master at Wrykyn.

“I see you’ve given Barry his second,
Trevor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think you’re wise to
play him for the first.  He knows the game, which
is the great thing, and he will improve with practice,”
said Mr Seymour, thus corroborating Milton’s
words of the previous Saturday.

“I’m glad Seymour thinks
Barry good,” said Trevor, as they walked on. 
“I shall go on playing him now.”

“Found out who wrote that letter yet?”

Trevor laughed.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Probably Rand-Brown,”
suggested Clowes.  “He’s the man who
would gain most by Barry’s not playing. 
I hear he had a row with Mill just before his study
was ragged.”

“Everybody in Seymour’s
has had rows with Mill some time or other,”
said Trevor.

Clowes stopped at the door of the
junior day-room to find his fag.  Trevor went
on upstairs.  In the passage he met Ruthven.

Ruthven seemed excited.

“I say.  Trevor,” he exclaimed, “have
you seen your study?”

“Why, what’s the matter with it?”

“You’d better go and look.”

VII

“WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE”

Trevor went and looked.

It was rather an interesting sight. 
An earthquake or a cyclone might have made it a little
more picturesque, but not much more.  The general
effect was not unlike that of an American saloon, after
a visit from Mrs Carrie Nation (with hatchet). 
As in the case of Mill’s study, the only thing
that did not seem to have suffered any great damage
was the table.  Everything else looked rather
off colour.  The mantelpiece had been swept as
bare as a bone, and its contents littered the floor. 
Trevor dived among the debris and retrieved the latest
addition to his art gallery, the photograph of this
year’s first fifteen.  It was a wreck. 
The glass was broken and the photograph itself slashed
with a knife till most of the faces were unrecognisable. 
He picked up another treasure, last year’s first
eleven.  Smashed glass again.  Faces cut about
with knife as before.  His collection of snapshots
was torn into a thousand fragments, though, as Mr
Jerome said of the papier-mâche trout, there
may only have been nine hundred.  He did not count
them.  His bookshelf was empty.  The books
had gone to swell the contents of the floor. 
There was a Shakespeare with its cover off.  Pages
twenty-two to thirty-one of Vice Versa had parted
from the parent establishment, and were lying by themselves
near the door. The Rogues’ March lay
just beyond them, and the look of the cover suggested
that somebody had either been biting it or jumping
on it with heavy boots.

There was other damage.  Over
the mantelpiece in happier days had hung a dozen sea
gulls’ eggs, threaded on a string.  The string
was still there, as good as new, but of the eggs nothing
was to be seen, save a fine parti-coloured powder—­on
the floor, like everything else in the study. 
And a good deal of ink had been upset in one place
and another.

Trevor had been staring at the ruins
for some time, when he looked up to see Clowes standing
in the doorway.

“Hullo,” said Clowes, “been tidying
up?”

Trevor made a few hasty comments on
the situation.  Clowes listened approvingly.

“Don’t you think,”
he went on, eyeing the study with a critical air,
“that you’ve got too many things on the
floor, and too few anywhere else?  And I should
move some of those books on to the shelf, if I were
you.”

Trevor breathed very hard.

“I should like to find the chap who did this,”
he said softly.

Clowes advanced into the room and
proceeded to pick up various misplaced articles of
furniture in a helpful way.

“I thought so,” he said presently, “come
and look here.”

Tied to a chair, exactly as it had
been in the case of Mill, was a neat white card, and
on it were the words, "With the Compliments of the
League".

“What are you going to do about
this?” asked Clowes.  “Come into my
room and talk it over.”

“I’ll tidy this place
up first,” said Trevor.  He felt that the
work would be a relief.  “I don’t
want people to see this.  It mustn’t get
about.  I’m not going to have my study turned
into a sort of side-show, like Mill’s. 
You go and change.  I shan’t be long.”

“I will never desert Mr Micawber,”
said Clowes.  “Friend, my place is by your
side.  Shut the door and let’s get to work.”

Ten minutes later the room had resumed
a more or less—­though principally less—­normal
appearance.  The books and chairs were back in
their places.  The ink was sopped up.  The
broken photographs were stacked in a neat pile in
one corner, with a rug over them.  The mantelpiece
was still empty, but, as Clowes pointed out, it now
merely looked as if Trevor had been pawning some of
his household gods.  There was no sign that a
devastating secret society had raged through the study.

Then they adjourned to Clowes’
study, where Trevor sank into Clowes’ second-best
chair—­Clowes, by an adroit movement, having
appropriated the best one—­with a sigh of
enjoyment.  Running and passing, followed by the
toil of furniture-shifting, had made him feel quite
tired.

“It doesn’t look so bad
now,” he said, thinking of the room they had
left.  “By the way, what did you do with
that card?”

“Here it is.  Want it?”

“You can keep it.  I don’t want it.”

“Thanks.  If this sort of
things goes on, I shall get quite a nice collection
of these cards.  Start an album some day.”

“You know,” said Trevor, “this is
getting serious.”

“It always does get serious
when anything bad happens to one’s self. 
It always strikes one as rather funny when things
happen to other people.  When Mill’s study
was wrecked, I bet you regarded it as an amusing and
original ‘turn’.  What do you think
of the present effort?”

“Who on earth can have done it?”

“The Pres—­”

“Oh, dry up.  Of course it was.  But
who the blazes is he?”

“Nay, children, you have me
there,” quoted Clowes.  “I’ll
tell you one thing, though.  You remember what
I said about it’s probably being Rand-Brown. 
He can’t have done this, that’s certain,
because he was out in the fields the whole time. 
Though I don’t see who else could have anything
to gain by Barry not getting his colours.”

“There’s no reason to
suspect him at all, as far as I can see.  I don’t
know much about him, bar the fact that he can’t
play footer for nuts, but I’ve never heard anything
against him.  Have you?”

“I scarcely know him myself.  He isn’t
liked in Seymour’s, I believe.”

“Well, anyhow, this can’t be his work.”

“That’s what I said.”

“For all we know, the League
may have got their knife into Barry for some reason. 
You said they used to get their knife into fellows
in that way.  Anyhow, I mean to find out who ragged
my room.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said
Clowes.

       *     *     *     *     *

O’Hara came round to Donaldson’s
before morning school next day to tell Trevor that
he had not yet succeeded in finding the lost bat. 
He found Trevor and Clowes in the former’s den,
trying to put a few finishing touches to the same.

“Hullo, an’ what’s
up with your study?” he inquired.  He was
quick at noticing things.  Trevor looked annoyed. 
Clowes asked the visitor if he did not think the study
presented a neat and gentlemanly appearance.

“Where are all your photographs,
Trevor?” persisted the descendant of Irish kings.

“It’s no good trying to
conceal anything from the bhoy,” said Clowes. 
“Sit down, O’Hara—­mind that
chair; it’s rather wobbly—­and I will
tell ye the story.”

“Can you keep a thing dark?” inquired
Trevor.

O’Hara protested that tombs were not in it.

“Well, then, do you remember
what happened to Mill’s study?  That’s
what’s been going on here.”

O’Hara nearly fell off his chair
with surprise.  That some philanthropist should
rag Mill’s study was only to be expected. 
Mill was one of the worst.  A worm without a saving
grace.  But Trevor!  Captain of football! 
In the first eleven!  The thing was unthinkable.

“But who—?” he began.

“That’s just what I want
to know,” said Trevor, shortly.  He did not
enjoy discussing the affair.

“How long have you been at Wrykyn, O’Hara?”
said Clowes.

O’Hara made a rapid calculation. 
His fingers twiddled in the air as he worked out the
problem.

“Six years,” he said at
last, leaning back exhausted with brain work.

“Then you must remember the League?”

“Remember the League?  Rather.”

“Well, it’s been revived.”

O’Hara whistled.

“This’ll liven the old
place up,” he said.  “I’ve often
thought of reviving it meself.  An’ so has
Moriarty.  If it’s anything like the Old
League, there’s going to be a sort of Donnybrook
before it’s done with.  I wonder who’s
running it this time.”

“We should like to know that.  If you find
out, you might tell us.”

“I will.”

“And don’t tell anybody
else,” said Trevor.  “This business
has got to be kept quiet.  Keep it dark about
my study having been ragged.”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“Not even Moriarty.”

“Oh, hang it, man,” put
in Clowes, “you don’t want to kill the
poor bhoy, surely?  You must let him tell one
person.”

“All right,” said Trevor,
“you can tell Moriarty.  But nobody else,
mind.”

O’Hara promised that Moriarty should receive
the news exclusively.

“But why did the League go for ye?”

“They happen to be down on me.  It doesn’t
matter why.  They are.”

“I see,” said O’Hara. 
“Oh,” he added, “about that bat. 
The search is being ’vigorously prosecuted’—­that’s
a newspaper quotation—­”

“Times?” inquired Clowes.

“Wrykyn Patriot,”
said O’Hara, pulling out a bundle of letters. 
He inspected each envelope in turn, and from the fifth
extracted a newspaper cutting.

“Read that,” he said.

It was from the local paper, and ran as follows:—­

“Hooligan Outrage—­A
painful sensation has been caused in the town by a
deplorable ebullition of local Hooliganism, which has
resulted in the wanton disfigurement of the splendid
statue of Sir Eustace Briggs which stands in the New
Recreation Grounds.  Our readers will recollect
that the statue was erected to commemorate the return
of Sir Eustace as member for the borough of Wrykyn,
by an overwhelming majority, at the last election. 
Last Tuesday some youths of the town, passing through
the Recreation Grounds early in the morning, noticed
that the face and body of the statue were completely
covered with leaves and some black substance, which
on examination proved to be tar.  They speedily
lodged information at the police station.  Everything
seems to point to party spite as the motive for the
outrage.  In view of the forth-coming election,
such an act is highly significant, and will serve
sufficiently to indicate the tactics employed by our
opponents.  The search for the perpetrator (or
perpetrators) of the dastardly act is being vigorously
prosecuted, and we learn with satisfaction that the
police have already several clues.”

“Clues!” said Clowes,
handing back the paper, “that means the bat. 
That gas about ‘our opponents’ is all a
blind to put you off your guard.  You wait. 
There’ll be more painful sensations before you’ve
finished with this business.”

“They can’t have found
the bat, or why did they not say so?” observed
O’Hara.

“Guile,” said Clowes,
“pure guile.  If I were you, I should escape
while I could.  Try Callao.  There’s
no extradition there.

    ’On no petition

     Is extradition

     Allowed in Callao.’

Either of you chaps coming over to school?”

VIII

O’HARA ON THE TRACK

Tuesday mornings at Wrykyn were devoted—­up
to the quarter to eleven interval—­to the
study of mathematics.  That is to say, instead
of going to their form-rooms, the various forms visited
the out-of-the-way nooks and dens at the top of the
buildings where the mathematical masters were wont
to lurk, and spent a pleasant two hours there playing
round games or reading fiction under the desk. 
Mathematics being one of the few branches of school
learning which are of any use in after life, nobody
ever dreamed of doing any work in that direction, least
of all O’Hara.  It was a theory of O’Hara’s
that he came to school to enjoy himself.  To have
done any work during a mathematics lesson would have
struck him as a positive waste of time, especially
as he was in Mr Banks’ class.  Mr Banks
was a master who simply cried out to be ragged. 
Everything he did and said seemed to invite the members
of his class to amuse themselves, and they amused
themselves accordingly.  One of the advantages
of being under him was that it was possible to predict
to a nicety the moment when one would be sent out
of the room.  This was found very convenient.

O’Hara’s ally, Moriarty,
was accustomed to take his mathematics with Mr Morgan,
whose room was directly opposite Mr Banks’. 
With Mr Morgan it was not quite so easy to date one’s
expulsion from the room under ordinary circumstances,
and in the normal wear and tear of the morning’s
work, but there was one particular action which could
always be relied upon to produce the desired result.

In one corner of the room stood a
gigantic globe.  The problem—­how did
it get into the room?—­was one that had exercised
the minds of many generations of Wrykinians. 
It was much too big to have come through the door. 
Some thought that the block had been built round it,
others that it had been placed in the room in infancy,
and had since grown.  To refer the question to
Mr Morgan would, in six cases out of ten, mean instant
departure from the room.  But to make the event
certain, it was necessary to grasp the globe firmly
and spin it round on its axis.  That always proved
successful.  Mr Morgan would dash down from his
dais, address the offender in spirited terms, and
give him his marching orders at once and without further
trouble.

Moriarty had arranged with O’Hara
to set the globe rolling at ten sharp on this particular
morning.  O’Hara would then so arrange matters
with Mr Banks that they could meet in the passage
at that hour, when O’Hara wished to impart to
his friend his information concerning the League.

O’Hara promised to be at the
trysting-place at the hour mentioned.

He did not think there would be any
difficulty about it.  The news that the League
had been revived meant that there would be trouble
in the very near future, and the prospect of trouble
was meat and drink to the Irishman in O’Hara. 
Consequently he felt in particularly good form for
mathematics (as he interpreted the word).  He thought
that he would have no difficulty whatever in keeping
Mr Banks bright and amused.  The first step had
to be to arouse in him an interest in life, to bring
him into a frame of mind which would induce him to
look severely rather than leniently on the next offender. 
This was effected as follows:—­

It was Mr Banks’ practice to
set his class sums to work out, and, after some three-quarters
of an hour had elapsed, to pass round the form what
he called “solutions”.  These were
large sheets of paper, on which he had worked out
each sum in his neat handwriting to a happy ending. 
When the head of the form, to whom they were passed
first, had finished with them, he would make a slight
tear in one corner, and, having done so, hand them
on to his neighbour.  The neighbour, before giving
them to his neighbour, would also tear them
slightly.  In time they would return to their
patentee and proprietor, and it was then that things
became exciting.

“Who tore these solutions like
this?” asked Mr Banks, in the repressed voice
of one who is determined that he will be calm.

No answer.  The tattered solutions waved in the
air.

He turned to Harringay, the head of the form.

“Harringay, did you tear these solutions like
this?”

Indignant negative from Harringay. 
What he had done had been to make the small tear in
the top left-hand corner.  If Mr Banks had asked,
“Did you make this small tear in the top left-hand
corner of these solutions?” Harringay would
have scorned to deny the impeachment.  But to
claim the credit for the whole work would, he felt,
be an act of flat dishonesty, and an injustice to
his gifted collaborateurs.

“No, sir,” said Harringay.

“Browne!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Did you tear these solutions in this manner?”

“No, sir.”

And so on through the form.

Then Harringay rose after the manner
of the debater who is conscious that he is going to
say the popular thing.

“Sir—­” he began.

“Sit down, Harringay.”

Harringay gracefully waved aside the absurd command.

“Sir,” he said, “I
think I am expressing the general consensus of opinion
among my—­ahem—­fellow-students,
when I say that this class sincerely regrets the unfortunate
state the solutions have managed to get themselves
into.”

“Hear, hear!” from a back bench.

“It is with—­”

“Sit down, Harringay.”

“It is with heartfelt—­”

“Harringay, if you do not sit down—­”

“As your ludship pleases.”  This sotto
voce.

And Harringay resumed his seat amidst applause. 
O’Hara got up.

“As me frind who has just sat down was about
to observe—­”

“Sit down, O’Hara.  The whole form
will remain after the class.”

“—­the unfortunate
state the solutions have managed to get thimsilves
into is sincerely regretted by this class.  Sir,
I think I am ixprissing the general consensus of opinion
among my fellow-students whin I say that it is with
heart-felt sorrow—­”

“O’Hara!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Leave the room instantly.”

“Yes, sir.”

From the tower across the gravel came
the melodious sound of chimes.  The college clock
was beginning to strike ten.  He had scarcely got
into the passage, and closed the door after him, when
a roar as of a bereaved spirit rang through the room
opposite, followed by a string of words, the only
intelligible one being the noun-substantive “globe”,
and the next moment the door opened and Moriarty came
out.  The last stroke of ten was just booming
from the clock.

There was a large cupboard in the
passage, the top of which made a very comfortable
seat.  They climbed on to this, and began to talk
business.

“An’ what was it ye wanted to tell me?”
inquired Moriarty.

O’Hara related what he had learned from Trevor
that morning.

“An’ do ye know,”
said Moriarty, when he had finished, “I half
suspected, when I heard that Mill’s study had
been ragged, that it might be the League that had
done it.  If ye remember, it was what they enjoyed
doing, breaking up a man’s happy home.  They
did it frequently.”

“But I can’t understand them doing it
to Trevor at all.”

“They’ll do it to anybody they choose
till they’re caught at it.”

“If they are caught, there’ll be a row.”

“We must catch ’em,”
said Moriarty.  Like O’Hara, he revelled
in the prospect of a disturbance.  O’Hara
and he were going up to Aldershot at the end of the
term, to try and bring back the light and middle-weight
medals respectively.  Moriarty had won the light-weight
in the previous year, but, by reason of putting on
a stone since the competition, was now no longer eligible
for that class.  O’Hara had not been up before,
but the Wrykyn instructor, a good judge of pugilistic
form, was of opinion that he ought to stand an excellent
chance.  As the prize-fighter in Rodney Stone
says, “When you get a good Irishman, you can’t
better ’em, but they’re dreadful ’asty.” 
O’Hara was attending the gymnasium every night,
in order to learn to curb his “dreadful ’astiness”,
and acquire skill in its place.

“I wonder if Trevor would be any good in a row,”
said Moriarty.

“He can’t box,”
said O’Hara, “but he’d go on till
he was killed entirely.  I say, I’m getting
rather tired of sitting here, aren’t you? 
Let’s go to the other end of the passage and
have some cricket.”

So, having unearthed a piece of wood
from the debris at the top of the cupboard, and rolled
a handkerchief into a ball, they adjourned.

Recalling the stirring events of six
years back, when the League had first been started,
O’Hara remembered that the members of that enterprising
society had been wont to hold meetings in a secluded
spot, where it was unlikely that they would be disturbed. 
It seemed to him that the first thing he ought to
do, if he wanted to make their nearer acquaintance
now, was to find their present rendezvous.  They
must have one.  They would never run the risk
involved in holding mass-meetings in one another’s
studies.  On the last occasion, it had been an
old quarry away out on the downs.  This had been
proved by the not-to-be-shaken testimony of three
school-house fags, who had wandered out one half-holiday
with the unconcealed intention of finding the League’s
place of meeting.  Unfortunately for them, they
had found it.  They were going down the
path that led to the quarry before-mentioned, when
they were unexpectedly seized, blindfolded, and carried
off.  An impromptu court-martial was held—­in
whispers—­and the three explorers forthwith
received the most spirited “touching-up”
they had ever experienced.  Afterwards they were
released, and returned to their house with their zeal
for detection quite quenched.  The episode had
created a good deal of excitement in the school at
the time.

On three successive afternoons, O’Hara
and Moriarty scoured the downs, and on each occasion
they drew blank.  On the fourth day, just before
lock-up, O’Hara, who had been to tea with Gregson,
of Day’s, was going over to the gymnasium to
keep a pugilistic appointment with Moriarty, when
somebody ran swiftly past him in the direction of the
boarding-houses.  It was almost dark, for the days
were still short, and he did not recognise the runner. 
But it puzzled him a little to think where he had
sprung from.  O’Hara was walking quite close
to the wall of the College buildings, and the runner
had passed between it and him.  And he had not
heard his footsteps.  Then he understood, and his
pulse quickened as he felt that he was on the track. 
Beneath the block was a large sort of cellar-basement. 
It was used as a store-room for chairs, and was never
opened except when prize-day or some similar event
occurred, when the chairs were needed.  It was
supposed to be locked at other times, but never was. 
The door was just by the spot where he was standing. 
As he stood there, half-a-dozen other vague forms dashed
past him in a knot.  One of them almost brushed
against him.  For a moment he thought of stopping
him, but decided not to.  He could wait.

On the following afternoon he slipped
down into the basement soon after school.  It
was as black as pitch in the cellar.  He took up
a position near the door.

It seemed hours before anything happened. 
He was, indeed, almost giving up the thing as a bad
job, when a ray of light cut through the blackness
in front of him, and somebody slipped through the door. 
The next moment, a second form appeared dimly, and
then the light was shut off again.

O’Hara could hear them groping
their way past him.  He waited no longer. 
It is difficult to tell where sound comes from in the
dark.  He plunged forward at a venture.  His
hand, swinging round in a semicircle, met something
which felt like a shoulder.  He slipped his grasp
down to the arm, and clutched it with all the force
at his disposal.

IX

MAINLY ABOUT FERRETS

“Ow!” exclaimed the captive,
with no uncertain voice.  “Let go, you ass,
you’re hurting.”

The voice was a treble voice. 
This surprised O’Hara.  It looked very much
as if he had put up the wrong bird.  From the dimensions
of the arm which he was holding, his prisoner seemed
to be of tender years.

“Let go, Harvey, you idiot.  I shall kick.”

Before the threat could be put into
execution, O’Hara, who had been fumbling all
this while in his pocket for a match, found one loose,
and struck a light.  The features of the owner
of the arm—­he was still holding it—­were
lit up for a moment.

“Why, it’s young Renford!”
he exclaimed.  “What are you doing down
here?”

Renford, however, continued to pursue
the topic of his arm, and the effect that the vice-like
grip of the Irishman had had upon it.

“You’ve nearly broken it,” he said,
complainingly.

“I’m sorry.  I mistook you for somebody
else.  Who’s that with you?”

“It’s me,” said an ungrammatical
voice.

“Who’s me?”

“Harvey.”

At this point a soft yellow light
lit up the more immediate neighbourhood.  Harvey
had brought a bicycle lamp into action.

“That’s more like it,”
said Renford.  “Look here, O’Hara,
you won’t split, will you?”

“I’m not an informer by profession, thanks,”
said O’Hara.

“Oh, I know it’s all right,
really, but you can’t be too careful, because
one isn’t allowed down here, and there’d
be a beastly row if it got out about our being down
here.”

“And they would be cobbed,” put
in Harvey.

“Who are they?” asked O’Hara.

“Ferrets.  Like to have a look at them?”

“Ferrets!”

“Yes.  Harvey brought back
a couple at the beginning of term.  Ripping little
beasts.  We couldn’t keep them in the house,
as they’d have got dropped on in a second, so
we had to think of somewhere else, and thought why
not keep them down here?”

“Why, indeed?” said O’Hara. 
“Do ye find they like it?”

“Oh, they don’t
mind,” said Harvey.  “We feed ’em
twice a day.  Once before breakfast—­we
take it in turns to get up early—­and once
directly after school.  And on half-holidays and
Sundays we take them out on to the downs.”

“What for?”

“Why, rabbits, of course. 
Renford brought back a saloon-pistol with him. 
We keep it locked up in a box—­don’t
tell any one.”

“And what do ye do with the rabbits?”

“We pot at them as they come out of the holes.”

“Yes, but when ye hit ’em?”

“Oh,” said Renford, with
some reluctance, “we haven’t exactly hit
any yet.”

“We’ve got jolly near,
though, lots of times,” said Harvey.  “Last
Saturday I swear I wasn’t more than a quarter
of an inch off one of them.  If it had been a
decent-sized rabbit, I should have plugged it middle
stump; only it was a small one, so I missed.  But
come and see them.  We keep ’em right at
the other end of the place, in case anybody comes
in.”

“Have you ever seen anybody down here?”
asked O’Hara.

“Once,” said Renford. 
“Half-a-dozen chaps came down here once while
we were feeding the ferrets.  We waited till they’d
got well in, then we nipped out quietly.  They
didn’t see us.”

“Did you see who they were?”

“No.  It was too dark. 
Here they are.  Rummy old crib this, isn’t
it?  Look out for your shins on the chairs. 
Switch on the light, Harvey.  There, aren’t
they rippers?  Quite tame, too.  They
know us quite well.  They know they’re going
to be fed, too.  Hullo, Sir Nigel!  This is
Sir Nigel.  Out of the ‘White Company’,
you know.  Don’t let him nip your fingers. 
This other one’s Sherlock Holmes.”

“Cats-s-s—­s!!”
said O’Hara.  He had a sort of idea that
that was the right thing to say to any animal that
could chase and bite.

Renford was delighted to be able to
show his ferrets off to so distinguished a visitor.

“What were you down here about?”
inquired Harvey, when the little animals had had their
meal, and had retired once more into private life.

O’Hara had expected this question,
but he did not quite know what answer to give. 
Perhaps, on the whole, he thought, it would be best
to tell them the real reason.  If he refused to
explain, their curiosity would be roused, which would
be fatal.  And to give any reason except the true
one called for a display of impromptu invention of
which he was not capable.  Besides, they would
not be likely to give away his secret while he held
this one of theirs connected with the ferrets. 
He explained the situation briefly, and swore them
to silence on the subject.

Renford’s comment was brief.

“By Jove!” he observed.

Harvey went more deeply into the question.

“What makes you think they meet down here?”
he asked.

“I saw some fellows cutting
out of here last night.  And you say ye’ve
seen them here, too.  I don’t see what object
they could have down here if they weren’t the
League holding a meeting.  I don’t see what
else a chap would be after.”

“He might be keeping ferrets,” hazarded
Renford.

“The whole school doesn’t
keep ferrets,” said O’Hara.  “You’re
unique in that way.  No, it must be the League,
an’ I mean to wait here till they come.”

“Not all night?” asked
Harvey.  He had a great respect for O’Hara,
whose reputation in the school for out-of-the-way
doings was considerable.  In the bright lexicon
of O’Hara he believed there to be no such word
as “impossible.”

“No,” said O’Hara,
“but till lock-up.  You two had better cut
now.”

“Yes, I think we’d better,” said
Harvey.

“And don’t ye breathe
a word about this to a soul”—­a warning
which extracted fervent promises of silence from both
youths.

“This,” said Harvey, as
they emerged on to the gravel, “is something
like.  I’m jolly glad we’re in it.”

“Rather.  Do you think O’Hara will
catch them?”

“He must if he waits down there
long enough.  They’re certain to come again. 
Don’t you wish you’d been here when the
League was on before?”

“I should think I did. 
Race you over to the shop.  I want to get something
before it shuts.”

“Right ho!” And they disappeared.

O’Hara waited where he was till
six struck from the clock-tower, followed by the sound
of the bell as it rang for lock-up.  Then he picked
his way carefully through the groves of chairs, barking
his shins now and then on their out-turned legs, and,
pushing open the door, went out into the open air. 
It felt very fresh and pleasant after the brand of
atmosphere supplied in the vault.  He then ran
over to the gymnasium to meet Moriarty, feeling a
little disgusted at the lack of success that had attended
his detective efforts up to the present.  So far
he had nothing to show for his trouble except a good
deal of dust on his clothes, and a dirty collar, but
he was full of determination.  He could play a
waiting game.

It was a pity, as it happened, that
O’Hara left the vault when he did.  Five
minutes after he had gone, six shadowy forms made their
way silently and in single file through the doorway
of the vault, which they closed carefully behind them. 
The fact that it was after lock-up was of small consequence. 
A good deal of latitude in that way was allowed at
Wrykyn.  It was the custom to go out, after the
bell had sounded, to visit the gymnasium.  In
the winter and Easter terms, the gymnasium became
a sort of social club.  People went there with
a very small intention of doing gymnastics.  They
went to lounge about, talking to cronies, in front
of the two huge stoves which warmed the place. 
Occasionally, as a concession to the look of the thing,
they would do an easy exercise or two on the horse
or parallels, but, for the most part, they preferred
the rôle of spectator.  There was plenty
to see.  In one corner O’Hara and Moriarty
would be sparring their nightly six rounds (in two
batches of three rounds each).  In another, Drummond,
who was going up to Aldershot as a feather-weight,
would be putting in a little practice with the instructor. 
On the apparatus, the members of the gymnastic six,
including the two experts who were to carry the school
colours to Aldershot in the spring, would be performing
their usual marvels.  It was worth dropping into
the gymnasium of an evening.  In no other place
in the school were so many sights to be seen.

When you were surfeited with sightseeing,
you went off to your house.  And this was where
the peculiar beauty of the gymnasium system came in. 
You went up to any master who happened to be there—­there
was always one at least—­and observed in
suave accents, “Please, sir, can I have a paper?”
Whereupon, he, taking a scrap of paper, would write
upon it, “J.  O. Jones (or A. B. Smith or
C. D. Robinson) left gymnasium at such-and-such a
time”.  And, by presenting this to the menial
who opened the door to you at your house, you went
in rejoicing, and all was peace.

Now, there was no mention on the paper
of the hour at which you came to the gymnasium—­only
of the hour at which you left.  Consequently, certain
lawless spirits would range the neighbourhood after
lock-up, and, by putting in a quarter of an hour at
the gymnasium before returning to their houses, escape
comment.  To this class belonged the shadowy forms
previously mentioned.

O’Hara had forgotten this custom,
with the result that he was not at the vault when
they arrived.  Moriarty, to whom he confided between
the rounds the substance of his evening’s discoveries,
reminded him of it.  “It’s no good
watching before lock-up,” he said.  “After
six is the time they’ll come, if they come at
all.”

“Bedad, ye’re right,”
said O’Hara.  “One of these nights
we’ll take a night off from boxing, and go and
watch.”

“Right,” said Moriarty.  “Are
ye ready to go on?”

“Yes.  I’m going to
practise that left swing at the body this round. 
The one Fitzsimmons does.”  And they “put
’em up” once more.

X

BEING A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

On the evening following O’Hara’s
adventure in the vaults, Barry and M’Todd were
in their study, getting out the tea-things.  Most
Wrykinians brewed in the winter and Easter terms,
when the days were short and lock-up early.  In
the summer term there were other things to do—­nets,
which lasted till a quarter to seven (when lock-up
was), and the baths—­and brewing practically
ceased.  But just now it was at its height, and
every evening, at a quarter past five, there might
be heard in the houses the sizzling of the succulent
sausage and other rare delicacies.  As a rule,
one or two studies would club together to brew, instead
of preparing solitary banquets.  This was found
both more convivial and more economical.  At Seymour’s,
studies numbers five, six, and seven had always combined
from time immemorial, and Barry, on obtaining study
six, had carried on the tradition.  In study five
were Drummond and his friend De Bertini.  In study
seven, which was a smaller room and only capable of
holding one person with any comfort, one James Rupert
Leather-Twigg (that was his singular name, as Mr Gilbert
has it) had taken up his abode.  The name of Leather-Twigg
having proved, at an early date in his career, too
great a mouthful for Wrykyn, he was known to his friends
and acquaintances by the euphonious title of Shoeblossom. 
The charm about the genial Shoeblossom was that you
could never tell what he was going to do next. 
All that you could rely on with any certainty was
that it would be something which would have been better
left undone.

It was just five o’clock when
Barry and M’Todd started to get things ready. 
They were not high enough up in the school to have
fags, so that they had to do this for themselves.

Barry was still in football clothes. 
He had been out running and passing with the first
fifteen.  M’Todd, whose idea of exercise
was winding up a watch, had been spending his time
since school ceased in the study with a book. 
He was in his ordinary clothes.  It was therefore
fortunate that, when he upset the kettle (he nearly
always did at some period of the evening’s business),
the contents spread themselves over Barry, and not
over himself.  Football clothes will stand any
amount of water, whereas M’Todd’s “Youth’s
winter suiting at forty-two shillings and sixpence”
might have been injured.  Barry, however, did not
look upon the episode in this philosophical light. 
He spoke to him eloquently for a while, and then sent
him downstairs to fetch more water.  While he
was away, Drummond and De Bertini came in.

“Hullo,” said Drummond, “tea ready?”

“Not much,” replied Barry,
bitterly, “not likely to be, either, at this
rate.  We’d just got the kettle going when
that ass M’Todd plunged against the table and
upset the lot over my bags.  Lucky the beastly
stuff wasn’t boiling.  I’m soaked.”

“While we wait—­the
sausages—­Yes?—­a good idea—­M’Todd,
he is downstairs—­but to wait?  No,
no.  Let us.  Shall we?  Is it not so? 
Yes?” observed Bertie, lucidly.

“Now construe,” said Barry,
looking at the linguist with a bewildered expression. 
It was a source of no little inconvenience to his friends
that De Bertini was so very fixed in his determination
to speak English.  He was a trier all the way,
was De Bertini.  You rarely caught him helping
out his remarks with the language of his native land. 
It was English or nothing with him.  To most of
his circle it might as well have been Zulu.

Drummond, either through natural genius
or because he spent more time with him, was generally
able to act as interpreter.  Occasionally there
would come a linguistic effort by which even he freely
confessed himself baffled, and then they would pass
on unsatisfied.  But, as a rule, he was equal
to the emergency.  He was so now.

“What Bertie means,” he
explained, “is that it’s no good us waiting
for M’Todd to come back.  He never could
fill a kettle in less than ten minutes, and even then
he’s certain to spill it coming upstairs and
have to go back again.  Let’s get on with
the sausages.”

The pan had just been placed on the
fire when M’Todd returned with the water. 
He tripped over the mat as he entered, and spilt about
half a pint into one of his football boots, which
stood inside the door, but the accident was comparatively
trivial, and excited no remark.

“I wonder where that slacker
Shoeblossom has got to,” said Barry.  “He
never turns up in time to do any work.  He seems
to regard himself as a beastly guest.  I wish
we could finish the sausages before he comes. 
It would be a sell for him.”

“Not much chance of that,”
said Drummond, who was kneeling before the fire and
keeping an excited eye on the spluttering pan, “you
see.  He’ll come just as we’ve finished
cooking them.  I believe the man waits outside
with his ear to the keyhole.  Hullo!  Stand
by with the plate.  They’ll be done in half
a jiffy.”

Just as the last sausage was deposited
in safety on the plate, the door opened, and Shoeblossom,
looking as if he had not brushed his hair since early
childhood, sidled in with an attempt at an easy nonchalance
which was rendered quite impossible by the hopeless
state of his conscience.

“Ah,” he said, “brewing, I see. 
Can I be of any use?”

“We’ve finished years ago,” said
Barry.

“Ages ago,” said M’Todd.

A look of intense alarm appeared on Shoeblossom’s
classical features.

“You’ve not finished, really?”

“We’ve finished cooking
everything,” said Drummond.  “We haven’t
begun tea yet.  Now, are you happy?”

Shoeblossom was.  So happy that
he felt he must do something to celebrate the occasion. 
He felt like a successful general.  There must
be something he could do to show that he regarded
the situation with approval.  He looked round
the study.  Ha!  Happy thought—­the
frying-pan.  That useful culinary instrument was
lying in the fender, still bearing its cargo of fat,
and beside it—­a sight to stir the blood
and make the heart beat faster—­were the
sausages, piled up on their plate.

Shoeblossom stooped.  He seized
the frying-pan.  He gave it one twirl in the air. 
Then, before any one could stop him, he had turned
it upside down over the fire.  As has been already
remarked, you could never predict exactly what James
Rupert Leather-Twigg would be up to next.

When anything goes out of the frying-pan
into the fire, it is usually productive of interesting
by-products.  The maxim applies to fat.  The
fat was in the fire with a vengeance.  A great
sheet of flame rushed out and up.  Shoeblossom
leaped back with a readiness highly creditable in
one who was not a professional acrobat.  The covering
of the mantelpiece caught fire.  The flames went
roaring up the chimney.

Drummond, cool while everything else
was so hot, without a word moved to the mantelpiece
to beat out the fire with a football shirt.  Bertie
was talking rapidly to himself in French.  Nobody
could understand what he was saying, which was possibly
fortunate.

By the time Drummond had extinguished
the mantelpiece, Barry had also done good work by
knocking the fire into the grate with the poker. 
M’Todd, who had been standing up till now in
the far corner of the room, gaping vaguely at things
in general, now came into action.  Probably it
was force of habit that suggested to him that the time
had come to upset the kettle.  At any rate, upset
it he did—­most of it over the glowing,
blazing mass in the grate, the rest over Barry. 
One of the largest and most detestable smells the
study had ever had to endure instantly assailed their
nostrils.  The fire in the study was out now,
but in the chimney it still blazed merrily.

“Go up on to the roof and heave
water down,” said Drummond, the strategist. 
“You can get out from Milton’s dormitory
window.  And take care not to chuck it down the
wrong chimney.”

Barry was starting for the door to
carry out these excellent instructions, when it flew
open.

“Pah!  What have you boys
been doing?  What an abominable smell.  Pah!”
said a muffled voice.  It was Mr Seymour. 
Most of his face was concealed in a large handkerchief,
but by the look of his eyes, which appeared above,
he did not seem pleased.  He took in the situation
at a glance.  Fires in the house were not rarities. 
One facetious sportsman had once made a rule of setting
the senior day-room chimney on fire every term. 
He had since left (by request), but fires still occurred.

“Is the chimney on fire?”

“Yes, sir,” said Drummond.

“Go and find Herbert, and tell
him to take some water on to the roof and throw it
down.”  Herbert was the boot and knife cleaner
at Seymour’s.

Barry went.  Soon afterwards a
splash of water in the grate announced that the intrepid
Herbert was hard at it.  Another followed, and
another.  Then there was a pause.  Mr Seymour
thought he would look up to see if the fire was out. 
He stooped and peered into the darkness, and, even
as he gazed, splash came the contents of the fourth
pail, together with some soot with which they had
formed a travelling acquaintance on the way down. 
Mr Seymour staggered back, grimy and dripping. 
There was dead silence in the study.  Shoeblossom’s
face might have been seen working convulsively.

The silence was broken by a hollow,
sepulchral voice with a strong Cockney accent.

“Did yer see any water come
down then, sir?” said the voice.

Shoeblossom collapsed into a chair,
and began to sob feebly.

       *     *     *     *     *

“—­disgraceful …
scandalous … get up, Leather-Twigg … not
to be trusted … babies … three hundred
lines, Leather-Twigg … abominable … surprised
… ought to be ashamed of yourselves … double,
Leather-Twigg … not fit to have studies … atrocious
…—­”

Such were the main heads of Mr Seymour’s
speech on the situation as he dabbed desperately at
the soot on his face with his handkerchief.  Shoeblossom
stood and gurgled throughout.  Not even the thought
of six hundred lines could quench that dauntless spirit.

“Finally,” perorated Mr
Seymour, as he was leaving the room, “as you
are evidently not to be trusted with rooms of your
own, I forbid you to enter them till further notice. 
It is disgraceful that such a thing should happen. 
Do you hear, Barry?  And you, Drummond?  You
are not to enter your studies again till I give you
leave.  Move your books down to the senior day-room
tonight.”

And Mr Seymour stalked off to clean himself.

“Anyhow,” said Shoeblossom,
as his footsteps died away, “we saved the sausages.”

It is this indomitable gift of looking
on the bright side that makes us Englishmen what we
are.

XI

THE HOUSE-MATCHES

It was something of a consolation
to Barry and his friends—­at any rate, to
Barry and Drummond—­that directly after they
had been evicted from their study, the house-matches
began.  Except for the Ripton match, the house-matches
were the most important event of the Easter term. 
Even the sports at the beginning of April were productive
of less excitement.  There were twelve houses
at Wrykyn, and they played on the “knocking-out”
system.  To be beaten once meant that a house was
no longer eligible for the competition.  It could
play “friendlies” as much as it liked,
but, play it never so wisely, it could not lift the
cup.  Thus it often happened that a weak house,
by fluking a victory over a strong rival, found itself,
much to its surprise, in the semi-final, or sometimes
even in the final.  This was rarer at football
than at cricket, for at football the better team generally
wins.

The favourites this year were Donaldson’s,
though some fancied Seymour’s.  Donaldson’s
had Trevor, whose leadership was worth almost more
than his play.  In no other house was training
so rigid.  You could tell a Donaldson’s
man, if he was in his house-team, at a glance. 
If you saw a man eating oatmeal biscuits in the shop,
and eyeing wistfully the while the stacks of buns
and pastry, you could put him down as a Donaldsonite
without further evidence.  The captains of the
other houses used to prescribe a certain amount of
self-abnegation in the matter of food, but Trevor
left his men barely enough to support life—­enough,
that is, of the things that are really worth eating. 
The consequence was that Donaldson’s would turn
out for an important match all muscle and bone, and
on such occasions it was bad for those of their opponents
who had been taking life more easily.  Besides
Trevor they had Clowes, and had had bad luck in not
having Paget.  Had Paget stopped, no other house
could have looked at them.  But by his departure,
the strength of the team had become more nearly on
a level with that of Seymour’s.

Some even thought that Seymour’s
were the stronger.  Milton was as good a forward
as the school possessed.  Besides him there were
Barry and Rand-Brown on the wings.  Drummond was
a useful half, and five of the pack had either first
or second fifteen colours.  It was a team that
would take some beating.

Trevor came to that conclusion early. 
“If we can beat Seymour’s, we’ll
lift the cup,” he said to Clowes.

“We’ll have to do all we know,”
was Clowes’ reply.

They were watching Seymour’s
pile up an immense score against a scratch team got
up by one of the masters.  The first round of the
competition was over.  Donaldson’s had beaten
Templar’s, Seymour’s the School House. 
Templar’s were rather stronger than the School
House, and Donaldson’s had beaten them by a
rather larger score than that which Seymour’s
had run up in their match.  But neither Trevor
nor Clowes was inclined to draw any augury from this. 
Seymour’s had taken things easily after half-time;
Donaldson’s had kept going hard all through.

“That makes Rand-Brown’s
fourth try,” said Clowes, as the wing three-quarter
of the second fifteen raced round and scored in the
corner.

“Yes.  This is the sort
of game he’s all right in.  The man who’s
marking him is no good.  Barry’s scored
twice, and both good tries, too.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt
which is the best man,” said Clowes.  “I
only mentioned that it was Rand-Brown’s fourth
as an item of interest.”

The game continued.  Barry scored a third try.

“We’re drawn against Appleby’s
next round,” said Trevor.  “We can
manage them all right.”

“When is it?”

“Next Thursday.  Nomads’ match on
Saturday.  Then Ripton, Saturday week.”

“Who’ve Seymour’s drawn?”

“Day’s.  It’ll
be a good game, too.  Seymour’s ought to
win, but they’ll have to play their best. 
Day’s have got some good men.”

“Fine scrum,” said Clowes. 
“Yes.  Quick in the open, too, which is
always good business.  I wish they’d beat
Seymour’s.”

“Oh, we ought to be all right, whichever wins.”

Appleby’s did not offer any
very serious resistance to the Donaldson attack. 
They were outplayed at every point of the game, and,
before half-time, Donaldson’s had scored their
thirty points.  It was a rule in all in-school
matches—­and a good rule, too—­that,
when one side led by thirty points, the match stopped. 
This prevented those massacres which do so much towards
crushing all the football out of the members of the
beaten team; and it kept the winning team from getting
slack, by urging them on to score their thirty points
before half-time.  There were some houses—­notoriously
slack—­which would go for a couple of seasons
without ever playing the second half of a match.

Having polished off the men of Appleby,
the Donaldson team trooped off to the other game to
see how Seymour’s were getting on with Day’s. 
It was evidently an exciting match.  The first
half had been played to the accompaniment of much
shouting from the ropes.  Though coming so early
in the competition, it was really the semi-final, for
whichever team won would be almost certain to get
into the final.  The school had turned up in large
numbers to watch.

“Seymour’s looking tired
of life,” said Clowes.  “That would
seem as if his fellows weren’t doing well.”

“What’s been happening
here?” asked Trevor of an enthusiast in a Seymour’s
house cap whose face was crimson with yelling.

“One goal all,” replied
the enthusiast huskily.  “Did you beat Appleby’s?”

“Yes.  Thirty points before
half-time.  Who’s been doing the scoring
here?”

“Milton got in for us. 
He barged through out of touch.  We’ve been
pressing the whole time.  Barry got over once,
but he was held up.  Hullo, they’re beginning
again.  Buck up, Sey-mour’s.”

His voice cracking on the high note,
he took an immense slab of vanilla chocolate as a
remedy for hoarseness.

“Who scored for Day’s?” asked Clowes.

“Strachan.  Rand-Brown let
him through from their twenty-five.  You never
saw anything so rotten as Rand-Brown.  He doesn’t
take his passes, and Strachan gets past him every
time.”

“Is Strachan playing on the wing?”

Strachan was the first fifteen full-back.

“Yes.  They’ve put
young Bassett back instead of him.  Sey-mour’s. 
Buck up, Seymour’s.  We-ell played! 
There, did you ever see anything like it?” he
broke off disgustedly.

The Seymourite playing centre next
to Rand-Brown had run through to the back and passed
out to his wing, as a good centre should.  It was
a perfect pass, except that it came at his head instead
of his chest.  Nobody with any pretensions to
decent play should have missed it.  Rand-Brown,
however, achieved that feat.  The ball struck his
hands and bounded forward.  The referee blew his
whistle for a scrum, and a certain try was lost.

From the scrum the Seymour’s
forwards broke away to the goal-line, where they were
pulled up by Bassett.  The next minute the defence
had been pierced, and Drummond was lying on the ball
a yard across the line.  The enthusiast standing
by Clowes expended the last relics of his voice in
commemorating the fact that his side had the lead.

“Drummond’ll be good next
year,” said Trevor.  And he made a mental
note to tell Allardyce, who would succeed him in the
command of the school football, to keep an eye on
the player in question.

The triumph of the Seymourites was
not long lived.  Milton failed to convert Drummond’s
try.  From the drop-out from the twenty-five line
Barry got the ball, and punted into touch.  The
throw-out was not straight, and a scrum was formed. 
The ball came out to the Day’s halves, and went
across to Strachan.  Rand-Brown hesitated, and
then made a futile spring at the first fifteen man’s
neck.  Strachan handed him off easily, and ran. 
The Seymour’s full-back, who was a poor player,
failed to get across in time.  Strachan ran round
behind the posts, the kick succeeded, and Day’s
now led by two points.

After this the game continued in Day’s
half.  Five minutes before time was up, Drummond
got the ball from a scrum nearly on the line, passed
it to Barry on the wing instead of opening up the game
by passing to his centres, and Barry slipped through
in the corner.  This put Seymour’s just
one point ahead, and there they stayed till the whistle
blew for no-side.

Milton walked over to the boarding-houses
with Clowes and Trevor.  He was full of the match,
particularly of the iniquity of Rand-Brown.  “I
slanged him on the field,” he said.  “It’s
a thing I don’t often do, but what else can
you do when a man plays like that?  He lost us
three certain tries.”

“When did you administer your rebuke?”
inquired Clowes.

“When he had let Strachan through
that second time, in the second half.  I asked
him why on earth he tried to play footer at all. 
I told him a good kiss-in-the-ring club was about
his form.  It was rather cheap, but I felt so
frightfully sick about it.  It’s sickening
to be let down like that when you’ve been pressing
the whole time, and ought to be scoring every other
minute.”

“What had he to say on the subject?” asked
Clowes.

“Oh, he gassed a bit until I
told him I’d kick him if he said another word. 
That shut him up.”

“You ought to have kicked him. 
You want all the kicking practice you can get. 
I never saw anything feebler than that shot of yours
after Drummond’s try.”

“I’d like to see you
take a kick like that.  It was nearly on the touch-line. 
Still, when we play you, we shan’t need to convert
any of our tries.  We’ll get our thirty
points without that.  Perhaps you’d like
to scratch?”

“As a matter of fact,”
said Clowes confidentially, “I am going to score
seven tries against you off my own bat.  You’ll
be sorry you ever turned out when we’ve finished
with you.”

XII

NEWS OF THE GOLD BAT

Shoeblossom sat disconsolately on
the table in the senior day-room.  He was not
happy in exile.  Brewing in the senior day-room
was a mere vulgar brawl, lacking all the refining
influences of the study.  You had to fight for
a place at the fire, and when you had got it ’twas
not always easy to keep it, and there was no privacy,
and the fellows were always bear-fighting, so that
it was impossible to read a book quietly for ten consecutive
minutes without some ass heaving a cushion at you
or turning out the gas.  Altogether Shoeblossom
yearned for the peace of his study, and wished earnestly
that Mr Seymour would withdraw the order of banishment. 
It was the not being able to read that he objected
to chiefly.  In place of brewing, the ex-proprietors
of studies five, six, and seven now made a practice
of going to the school shop.  It was more expensive
and not nearly so comfortable—­there is a
romance about a study brew which you can never get
anywhere else—­but it served, and it was
not on this score that he grumbled most.  What
he hated was having to live in a bear-garden. 
For Shoeblossom was a man of moods.  Give him
two or three congenial spirits to back him up, and
he would lead the revels with the abandon of
a Mr Bultitude (after his return to his original form). 
But he liked to choose his accomplices, and the gay
sparks of the senior day-room did not appeal to him. 
They were not intellectual enough.  In his lucid
intervals, he was accustomed to be almost abnormally
solemn and respectable.  When not promoting some
unholy rag, Shoeblossom resembled an elderly gentleman
of studious habits.  He liked to sit in a comfortable
chair and read a book.  It was the impossibility
of doing this in the senior day-room that led him to
try and think of some other haven where he might rest. 
Had it been summer, he would have taken some literature
out on to the cricket-field or the downs, and put
in a little steady reading there, with the aid of
a bag of cherries.  But with the thermometer low,
that was impossible.

He felt very lonely and dismal. 
He was not a man with many friends.  In fact,
Barry and the other three were almost the only members
of the house with whom he was on speaking-terms. 
And of these four he saw very little.  Drummond
and Barry were always out of doors or over at the
gymnasium, and as for M’Todd and De Bertini,
it was not worth while talking to the one, and impossible
to talk to the other.  No wonder Shoeblossom felt
dull.  Once Barry and Drummond had taken him over
to the gymnasium with them, but this had bored him
worse than ever.  They had been hard at it all
the time—­for, unlike a good many of the
school, they went to the gymnasium for business, not
to lounge—­and he had had to sit about watching
them.  And watching gymnastics was one of the
things he most loathed.  Since then he had refused
to go.

That night matters came to a head. 
Just as he had settled down to read, somebody, in
flinging a cushion across the room, brought down the
gas apparatus with a run, and before light was once
more restored it was tea-time.  After that there
was preparation, which lasted for two hours, and by
the time he had to go to bed he had not been able to
read a single page of the enthralling work with which
he was at present occupied.

He had just got into bed when he was
struck with a brilliant idea.  Why waste the precious
hours in sleep?  What was that saying of somebody’s,
“Five hours for a wise man, six for somebody
else—­he forgot whom—­eight for
a fool, nine for an idiot,” or words to that
effect?  Five hours sleep would mean that he need
not go to bed till half past two.  In the meanwhile
he could be finding out exactly what the hero did
do when he found out (to his horror) that it was his
cousin Jasper who had really killed the old gentleman
in the wood.  The only question was—­how
was he to do his reading?  Prefects were allowed
to work on after lights out in their dormitories by
the aid of a candle, but to the ordinary mortal this
was forbidden.

Then he was struck with another brilliant
idea.  It is a curious thing about ideas. 
You do not get one for over a month, and then there
comes a rush of them, all brilliant.  Why, he
thought, should he not go and read in his study with
a dark lantern?  He had a dark lantern.  It
was one of the things he had found lying about at
home on the last day of the holidays, and had brought
with him to school.  It was his custom to go about
the house just before the holidays ended, snapping
up unconsidered trifles, which might or might not
come in useful.  This term he had brought back
a curious metal vase (which looked Indian, but which
had probably been made in Birmingham the year before
last), two old coins (of no mortal use to anybody
in the world, including himself), and the dark lantern. 
It was reposing now in the cupboard in his study nearest
the window.

He had brought his book up with him
on coming to bed, on the chance that he might have
time to read a page or two if he woke up early. (He
had always been doubtful about that man Jasper. 
For one thing, he had been seen pawning the old gentleman’s
watch on the afternoon of the murder, which was a
suspicious circumstance, and then he was not a nice
character at all, and just the sort of man who would
be likely to murder old gentlemen in woods.) He waited
till Mr Seymour had paid his nightly visit—­he
went the round of the dormitories at about eleven—­and
then he chuckled gently.  If Mill, the dormitory
prefect, was awake, the chuckle would make him speak,
for Mill was of a suspicious nature, and believed
that it was only his unintermitted vigilance which
prevented the dormitory ragging all night.

Mill was awake.

“Be quiet, there,” he growled.  “Shut
up that noise.”

Shoeblossom felt that the time was
not yet ripe for his departure.  Half an hour
later he tried again.  There was no rebuke. 
To make certain he emitted a second chuckle, replete
with sinister meaning.  A slight snore came from
the direction of Mill’s bed.  Shoeblossom
crept out of the room, and hurried to his study. 
The door was not locked, for Mr Seymour had relied
on his commands being sufficient to keep the owner
out of it.  He slipped in, found and lit the dark
lantern, and settled down to read.  He read with
feverish excitement.  The thing was, you see, that
though Claud Trevelyan (that was the hero) knew jolly
well that it was Jasper who had done the murder, the
police didn’t, and, as he (Claud) was too noble
to tell them, he had himself been arrested on suspicion. 
Shoeblossom was skimming through the pages with starting
eyes, when suddenly his attention was taken from his
book by a sound.  It was a footstep.  Somebody
was coming down the passage, and under the door filtered
a thin stream of light.  To snap the dark slide
over the lantern and dart to the door, so that if
it opened he would be behind it, was with him, as
Mr Claud Trevelyan might have remarked, the work of
a moment.  He heard the door of study number five
flung open, and then the footsteps passed on, and
stopped opposite his own den.  The handle turned,
and the light of a candle flashed into the room, to
be extinguished instantly as the draught of the moving
door caught it.

Shoeblossom heard his visitor utter
an exclamation of annoyance, and fumble in his pocket
for matches.  He recognised the voice.  It
was Mr Seymour’s.  The fact was that Mr
Seymour had had the same experience as General Stanley
in The Pirates of Penzance: 

    The man who finds his conscience
ache,

      No peace at all
enjoys;

    And, as I lay in bed awake,

      I thought I heard
a noise.

Whether Mr Seymour’s conscience
ached or not, cannot, of course, be discovered. 
But he had certainly thought he heard a noise, and
he had come to investigate.

The search for matches had so far
proved fruitless.  Shoeblossom stood and quaked
behind the door.  The reek of hot tin from the
dark lantern grew worse momentarily.  Mr Seymour
sniffed several times, until Shoeblossom thought that
he must be discovered.  Then, to his immense relief,
the master walked away.  Shoeblossom’s chance
had come.  Mr Seymour had probably gone to get
some matches to relight his candle.  It was far
from likely that the episode was closed.  He would
be back again presently.  If Shoeblossom was going
to escape, he must do it now, so he waited till the
footsteps had passed away, and then darted out in the
direction of his dormitory.

As he was passing Milton’s study,
a white figure glided out of it.  All that he
had ever read or heard of spectres rushed into Shoeblossom’s
petrified brain.  He wished he was safely in bed. 
He wished he had never come out of it.  He wished
he had led a better and nobler life.  He wished
he had never been born.

The figure passed quite close to him
as he stood glued against the wall, and he saw it
disappear into the dormitory opposite his own, of
which Rigby was prefect.  He blushed hotly at the
thought of the fright he had been in.  It was
only somebody playing the same game as himself.

He jumped into bed and lay down, having
first plunged the lantern bodily into his jug to extinguish
it.  Its indignant hiss had scarcely died away
when Mr Seymour appeared at the door.  It had occurred
to Mr Seymour that he had smelt something very much
out of the ordinary in Shoeblossom’s study,
a smell uncommonly like that of hot tin.  And a
suspicion dawned on him that Shoeblossom had been in
there with a dark lantern.  He had come to the
dormitory to confirm his suspicions.  But a glance
showed him how unjust they had been.  There was
Shoeblossom fast asleep.  Mr Seymour therefore
followed the excellent example of my Lord Tomnoddy
on a celebrated occasion, and went off to bed.

       *     *     *     *     *

It was the custom for the captain
of football at Wrykyn to select and publish the team
for the Ripton match a week before the day on which
it was to be played.  On the evening after the
Nomads’ match, Trevor was sitting in his study
writing out the names, when there came a knock at
the door, and his fag entered with a letter.

“This has just come, Trevor,” he said.

“All right.  Put it down.”

The fag left the room.  Trevor
picked up the letter.  The handwriting was strange
to him.  The words had been printed.  Then
it flashed upon him that he had received a letter
once before addressed in the same way—­the
letter from the League about Barry.  Was this,
too, from that address?  He opened it.

It was.

He read it, and gasped.  The worst
had happened.  The gold bat was in the hands of
the enemy.

XIII

VICTIM NUMBER THREE

“With reference to our last
communication,” ran the letter—­the
writer evidently believed in the commercial style—­“it
may interest you to know that the bat you lost by
the statue on the night of the 26th of January has
come into our possession. We observe that Barry
is still playing for the first fifteen.”

“And will jolly well continue
to,” muttered Trevor, crumpling the paper viciously
into a ball.

He went on writing the names for the
Ripton match.  The last name on the list was Barry’s.

Then he sat back in his chair, and
began to wrestle with this new development.  Barry
must play.  That was certain.  All the bluff
in the world was not going to keep him from playing
the best man at his disposal in the Ripton match. 
He himself did not count.  It was the school he
had to think of.  This being so, what was likely
to happen?  Though nothing was said on the point,
he felt certain that if he persisted in ignoring the
League, that bat would find its way somehow—­by
devious routes, possibly—­to the headmaster
or some one else in authority.  And then there
would be questions—­awkward questions—­and
things would begin to come out.  Then a fresh
point struck him, which was, that whatever might happen
would affect, not himself, but O’Hara.  This
made it rather more of a problem how to act. 
Personally, he was one of those dogged characters
who can put up with almost anything themselves. 
If this had been his affair, he would have gone on
his way without hesitating.  Evidently the writer
of the letter was under the impression that he had
been the hero (or villain) of the statue escapade.

If everything came out it did not
require any great effort of prophecy to predict what
the result would be.  O’Hara would go. 
Promptly.  He would receive his marching orders
within ten minutes of the discovery of what he had
done.  He would be expelled twice over, so to speak,
once for breaking out at night—­one of the
most heinous offences in the school code—­and
once for tarring the statue.  Anything that gave
the school a bad name in the town was a crime in the
eyes of the powers, and this was such a particularly
flagrant case.  Yes, there was no doubt of that. 
O’Hara would take the first train home without
waiting to pack up.  Trevor knew his people well,
and he could imagine their feelings when the prodigal
strolled into their midst—­an old Wrykinian
malgré lui.  As the philosopher said of
falling off a ladder, it is not the falling that matters: 
it is the sudden stopping at the other end.  It
is not the being expelled that is so peculiarly objectionable: 
it is the sudden homecoming.  With this gloomy
vision before him, Trevor almost wavered.  But
the thought that the selection of the team had nothing
whatever to do with his personal feelings strengthened
him.  He was simply a machine, devised to select
the fifteen best men in the school to meet Ripton. 
In his official capacity of football captain he was
not supposed to have any feelings.  However, he
yielded in so far that he went to Clowes to ask his
opinion.

Clowes, having heard everything and
seen the letter, unhesitatingly voted for the right
course.  If fifty mad Irishmen were to be expelled,
Barry must play against Ripton.  He was the best
man, and in he must go.

“That’s what I thought,”
said Trevor.  “It’s bad for O’Hara,
though.”

Clowes remarked somewhat tritely that
business was business.

“Besides,” he went on,
“you’re assuming that the thing this letter
hints at will really come off.  I don’t think
it will.  A man would have to be such an awful
blackguard to go as low as that.  The least grain
of decency in him would stop him.  I can imagine
a man threatening to do it as a piece of bluff—­by
the way, the letter doesn’t actually say anything
of the sort, though I suppose it hints at it—­but
I can’t imagine anybody out of a melodrama doing
it.”

“You can never tell,”
said Trevor.  He felt that this was but an outside
chance.  The forbearance of one’s antagonist
is but a poor thing to trust to at the best of times.

“Are you going to tell O’Hara?”
asked Clowes.

“I don’t see the good.  Would you?”

“No.  He can’t do
anything, and it would only give him a bad time. 
There are pleasanter things, I should think, than
going on from day to day not knowing whether you’re
going to be sacked or not within the next twelve hours. 
Don’t tell him.”

“I won’t.  And Barry plays against
Ripton.”

“Certainly.  He’s the best man.”

“I’m going over to Seymour’s
now,” said Trevor, after a pause, “to see
Milton.  We’ve drawn Seymour’s in the
next round of the house-matches.  I suppose you
knew.  I want to get it over before the Ripton
match, for several reasons.  About half the fifteen
are playing on one side or the other, and it’ll
give them a good chance of getting fit.  Running
and passing is all right, but a good, hard game’s
the thing for putting you into form.  And then
I was thinking that, as the side that loses, whichever
it is—­”

“Seymour’s, of course.”

“Hope so.  Well, they’re
bound to be a bit sick at losing, so they’ll
play up all the harder on Saturday to console themselves
for losing the cup.”

“My word, what strategy!”
said Clowes.  “You think of everything. 
When do you think of playing it, then?”

“Wednesday struck me as a good day.  Don’t
you think so?”

“It would do splendidly. 
It’ll be a good match.  For all practical
purposes, of course, it’s the final.  If
we beat Seymour’s, I don’t think the others
will trouble us much.”

There was just time to see Milton
before lock-up.  Trevor ran across to Seymour’s,
and went up to his study.

“Come in,” said Milton, in answer to his
knock.

Trevor went in, and stood surprised
at the difference in the look of the place since the
last time he had visited it.  The walls, once
covered with photographs, were bare.  Milton, seated
before the fire, was ruefully contemplating what looked
like a heap of waste cardboard.

Trevor recognised the symptoms.  He had had experience.

“You don’t mean to say they’ve been
at you, too!” he cried.

Milton’s normally cheerful face was thunderous
and gloomy.

“Yes.  I was thinking what I’d like
to do to the man who ragged it.”

“It’s the League again, I suppose?”

Milton looked surprised.

“Again?” he said,
“where did you hear of the League? 
This is the first time I’ve heard of its existence,
whatever it is.  What is the confounded thing,
and why on earth have they played the fool here? 
What’s the meaning of this bally rot?”

He exhibited one of the variety of
cards of which Trevor had already seen two specimens. 
Trevor explained briefly the style and nature of the
League, and mentioned that his study also had been
wrecked.

“Your study?  Why, what have they got against
you?”

“I don’t know,”
said Trevor.  Nothing was to be gained by speaking
of the letters he had received.

“Did they cut up your photographs?”

“Every one.”

“I tell you what it is, Trevor,
old chap,” said Milton, with great solemnity,
“there’s a lunatic in the school. 
That’s what I make of it.  A lunatic whose
form of madness is wrecking studies.”

“But the same chap couldn’t
have done yours and mine.  It must have been a
Donaldson’s fellow who did mine, and one of your
chaps who did yours and Mill’s.”

“Mill’s?  By Jove,
of course.  I never thought of that.  That
was the League, too, I suppose?”

“Yes.  One of those cards
was tied to a chair, but Clowes took it away before
anybody saw it.”

Milton returned to the details of the disaster.

“Was there any ink spilt in your room?”

“Pints,” said Trevor, shortly.  The
subject was painful.

“So there was here,” said Milton, mournfully. 
“Gallons.”

There was silence for a while, each pondering over
his wrongs.

“Gallons,” said Milton
again.  “I was ass enough to keep a large
pot full of it here, and they used it all, every drop. 
You never saw such a sight.”

Trevor said he had seen one similar spectacle.

“And my photographs!  You
remember those photographs I showed you?  All
ruined.  Slit across with a knife.  Some torn
in half.  I wish I knew who did that.”

Trevor said he wished so, too.

“There was one of Mrs Patrick
Campbell,” Milton continued in heartrending
tones, “which was torn into sixteen pieces. 
I counted them.  There they are on the mantelpiece. 
And there was one of Little Tich” (here he almost
broke down), “which was so covered with ink that
for half an hour I couldn’t recognise it. 
Fact.”

Trevor nodded sympathetically.

“Yes,” said Milton.  “Soaked.”

There was another silence.  Trevor
felt it would be almost an outrage to discuss so prosaic
a topic as the date of a house-match with one so broken
up.  Yet time was flying, and lock-up was drawing
near.

“Are you willing to play—­”
he began.

“I feel as if I could never
play again,” interrupted Milton.  “You’d
hardly believe the amount of blotting-paper I’ve
used today.  It must have been a lunatic, Dick,
old man.”

When Milton called Trevor “Dick”,
it was a sign that he was moved.  When he called
him “Dick, old man”, it gave evidence of
an internal upheaval without parallel.

“Why, who else but a lunatic
would get up in the night to wreck another chap’s
study?  All this was done between eleven last night
and seven this morning.  I turned in at eleven,
and when I came down here again at seven the place
was a wreck.  It must have been a lunatic.”

“How do you account for the
printed card from the League?”

Milton murmured something about madmen’s
cunning and diverting suspicion, and relapsed into
silence.  Trevor seized the opportunity to make
the proposal he had come to make, that Donaldson’s
v. Seymour’s should be played on the
following Wednesday.

Milton agreed listlessly.

“Just where you’re standing,”
he said, “I found a photograph of Sir Henry
Irving so slashed about that I thought at first it
was Huntley Wright in San Toy.”

“Start at two-thirty sharp,” said Trevor.

“I had seventeen of Edna May,”
continued the stricken Seymourite, monotonously. 
“In various attitudes.  All destroyed.”

“On the first fifteen ground,
of course,” said Trevor.  “I’ll
get Aldridge to referee.  That’ll suit you,
I suppose?”

“All right.  Anything you
like.  Just by the fireplace I found the remains
of Arthur Roberts in H.M.S.  Irresponsible. 
And part of Seymour Hicks.  Under the table—­”

Trevor departed.

XIV

THE WHITE FIGURE

“Suppose,” said Shoeblossom
to Barry, as they were walking over to school on the
morning following the day on which Milton’s study
had passed through the hands of the League, “suppose
you thought somebody had done something, but you weren’t
quite certain who, but you knew it was some one, what
would you do?”

“What on earth do you mean?” inquired
Barry.

“I was trying to make an A.B. case of it,”
explained Shoeblossom.

“What’s an A.B. case?”

“I don’t know,”
admitted Shoeblossom, frankly.  “But it comes
in a book of Stevenson’s.  I think it must
mean a sort of case where you call everyone A. and
B. and don’t tell their names.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“It’s about Milton’s study.”

“What! what about it?”

“Well, you see, the night it
was ragged I was sitting in my study with a dark lantern—­”

“What!”

Shoeblossom proceeded to relate the
moving narrative of his night-walking adventure. 
He dwelt movingly on his state of mind when standing
behind the door, waiting for Mr Seymour to come in
and find him.  He related with appropriate force
the hair-raising episode of the weird white figure. 
And then he came to the conclusions he had since drawn
(in calmer moments) from that apparition’s movements.

“You see,” he said, “I
saw it coming out of Milton’s study, and that
must have been about the time the study was ragged. 
And it went into Rigby’s dorm.  So it must
have been a chap in that dorm, who did it.”

Shoeblossom was quite clever at rare
intervals.  Even Barry, whose belief in his sanity
was of the smallest, was compelled to admit that here,
at any rate, he was talking sense.

“What would you do?” asked Shoeblossom.

“Tell Milton, of course,” said Barry.

“But he’d give me beans for being out
of the dorm, after lights-out.”

This was a distinct point to be considered. 
The attitude of Barry towards Milton was different
from that of Shoeblossom.  Barry regarded him—­through
having played with him in important matches—­as
a good sort of fellow who had always behaved decently
to him.  Leather-Twigg, on the other hand, looked
on him with undisguised apprehension, as one in authority
who would give him lines the first time he came into
contact with him, and cane him if he ever did it again. 
He had a decided disinclination to see Milton on any
pretext whatever.

“Suppose I tell him?” suggested Barry.

“You’ll keep my name dark?” said
Shoeblossom, alarmed.

Barry said he would make an A.B. case of it.

After school he went to Milton’s
study, and found him still brooding over its departed
glories.

“I say, Milton, can I speak to you for a second?”

“Hullo, Barry.  Come in.”

Barry came in.

“I had forty-three photographs,”
began Milton, without preamble.  “All destroyed. 
And I’ve no money to buy any more.  I had
seventeen of Edna May.”

Barry, feeling that he was expected
to say something, said, “By Jove!  Really?”

“In various positions,” continued Milton. 
“All ruined.”

“Not really?” said Barry.

“There was one of Little Tich—­”

But Barry felt unequal to playing
the part of chorus any longer.  It was all very
thrilling, but, if Milton was going to run through
the entire list of his destroyed photographs, life
would be too short for conversation on any other topic.

“I say, Milton,” he said, “it was
about that that I came.  I’m sorry—­”

Milton sat up.

“It wasn’t you who did this, was it?”

“No, no,” said Barry, hastily.

“Oh, I thought from your saying you were sorry—­”

“I was going to say I thought
I could put you on the track of the chap who did do
it—­”

For the second time since the interview began Milton
sat up.

“Go on,” he said.

“—­But I’m sorry
I can’t give you the name of the fellow who told
me about it.”

“That doesn’t matter,”
said Milton.  “Tell me the name of the fellow
who did it.  That’ll satisfy me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, either.”

“Have you any idea what you can do?”
asked Milton, satirically.

“I can tell you something which may put you
on the right track.”

“That’ll do for a start.  Well?”

“Well, the chap who told me—­I’ll
call him A.; I’m going to make an A.B. case
of it—­was coming out of his study at about
one o’clock in the morning—­”

“What the deuce was he doing that for?”

“Because he wanted to go back to bed,”
said Barry.

“About time, too.  Well?”

“As he was going past your study, a white figure
emerged—­”

“I should strongly advise you,
young Barry,” said Milton, gravely, “not
to try and rot me in any way.  You’re a jolly
good wing three-quarters, but you shouldn’t
presume on it.  I’d slay the Old Man himself
if he rotted me about this business.”

Barry was quite pained at this sceptical
attitude in one whom he was going out of his way to
assist.

“I’m not rotting,” he protested. 
“This is all quite true.”

“Well, go on.  You were saying something
about white figures emerging.”

“Not white figures.  A white
figure,” corrected Barry.  “It came
out of your study—­”

“—­And vanished through the wall?”

“It went into Rigby’s
dorm.,” said Barry, sulkily.  It was maddening
to have an exclusive bit of news treated in this way.

“Did it, by Jove!” said
Milton, interested at last.  “Are you sure
the chap who told you wasn’t pulling your leg? 
Who was it told you?”

“I promised him not to say.”

“Out with it, young Barry.”

“I won’t,” said Barry.

“You aren’t going to tell me?”

“No.”

Milton gave up the point with much
cheerfulness.  He liked Barry, and he realised
that he had no right to try and make him break his
promise.

“That’s all right,”
he said.  “Thanks very much, Barry. 
This may be useful.”

“I’d tell you his name if I hadn’t
promised, you know, Milton.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Milton. 
“It’s not important.”

“Oh, there was one thing I forgot. 
It was a biggish chap the fellow saw.”

“How big!  My size?”

“Not quite so tall, I should
think.  He said he was about Seymour’s size.”

“Thanks.  That’s worth knowing. 
Thanks very much, Barry.”

When his visitor had gone, Milton
proceeded to unearth one of the printed lists of the
house which were used for purposes of roll-call. 
He meant to find out who were in Rigby’s dormitory. 
He put a tick against the names.  There were eighteen
of them.  The next thing was to find out which
of them was about the same height as Mr Seymour. 
It was a somewhat vague description, for the house-master
stood about five feet nine or eight, and a good many
of the dormitory were that height, or near it. 
At last, after much brain-work, he reduced the number
of “possibles” to seven.  These seven
were Rigby himself, Linton, Rand-Brown, Griffith,
Hunt, Kershaw, and Chapple.  Rigby might be scratched
off the list at once.  He was one of Milton’s
greatest friends.  Exeunt also Griffith, Hunt,
and Kershaw.  They were mild youths, quite incapable
of any deed of devilry.  There remained, therefore,
Chapple, Linton, and Rand-Brown.  Chapple was
a boy who was invariably late for breakfast.  The
inference was that he was not likely to forego his
sleep for the purpose of wrecking studies.  Chapple
might disappear from the list.  Now there were
only Linton and Rand-Brown to be considered.  His
suspicions fell on Rand-Brown.  Linton was the
last person, he thought, to do such a low thing. 
He was a cheerful, rollicking individual, who was popular
with everyone and seemed to like everyone.  He
was not an orderly member of the house, certainly,
and on several occasions Milton had found it necessary
to drop on him heavily for creating disturbances. 
But he was not the sort that bears malice.  He
took it all in the way of business, and came up smiling
after it was over.  No, everything pointed to
Rand-Brown.  He and Milton had never got on well
together, and quite recently they had quarrelled openly
over the former’s play in the Day’s match. 
Rand-Brown must be the man.  But Milton was sensible
enough to feel that so far he had no real evidence
whatever.  He must wait.

On the following afternoon Seymour’s turned
out to play Donaldson’s.

The game, like most house-matches,
was played with the utmost keenness.  Both teams
had good three-quarters, and they attacked in turn. 
Seymour’s had the best of it forward, where Milton
was playing a great game, but Trevor in the centre
was the best outside on the field, and pulled up rush
after rush.  By half-time neither side had scored.

After half-time Seymour’s, playing
downhill, came away with a rush to the Donaldsonites’
half, and Rand-Brown, with one of the few decent runs
he had made in good class football that term, ran in
on the left.  Milton took the kick, but failed,
and Seymour’s led by three points.  For
the next twenty minutes nothing more was scored. 
Then, when five minutes more of play remained, Trevor
gave Clowes an easy opening, and Clowes sprinted between
the posts.  The kick was an easy one, and what
sporting reporters term “the major points”
were easily added.

When there are five more minutes to
play in an important house-match, and one side has
scored a goal and the other a try, play is apt to
become spirited.  Both teams were doing all they
knew.  The ball came out to Barry on the right. 
Barry’s abilities as a three-quarter rested
chiefly on the fact that he could dodge well. 
This eel-like attribute compensated for a certain
lack of pace.  He was past the Donaldson’s
three-quarters in an instant, and running for the line,
with only the back to pass, and with Clowes in hot
pursuit.  Another wriggle took him past the back,
but it also gave Clowes time to catch him up. 
Clowes was a far faster runner, and he got to him
just as he reached the twenty-five line.  They
came down together with a crash, Clowes on top, and
as they fell the whistle blew.

“No-side,” said Mr. Aldridge,
the master who was refereeing.

Clowes got up.

“All over,” he said.  “Jolly
good game.  Hullo, what’s up?”

For Barry seemed to be in trouble.

“You might give us a hand up,”
said the latter.  “I believe I’ve twisted
my beastly ankle or something.”

XV

A SPRAIN AND A VACANT PLACE

“I say,” said Clowes,
helping him up, “I’m awfully sorry. 
Did I do it?  How did it happen?”

Barry was engaged in making various
attempts at standing on the injured leg.  The
process seemed to be painful.

“Shall I get a stretcher or anything?  Can
you walk?”

“If you’d help me over
to the house, I could manage all right.  What a
beastly nuisance!  It wasn’t your fault a
bit.  Only you tackled me when I was just trying
to swerve, and my ankle was all twisted.”

Drummond came up, carrying Barry’s blazer and
sweater.

“Hullo, Barry,” he said, “what’s
up?  You aren’t crocked?”

“Something gone wrong with my
ankle.  That my blazer?  Thanks.  Coming
over to the house?  Clowes was just going to help
me over.”

Clowes asked a Donaldson’s junior,
who was lurking near at hand, to fetch his blazer
and carry it over to the house, and then made his way
with Drummond and the disabled Barry to Seymour’s. 
Having arrived at the senior day-room, they deposited
the injured three-quarter in a chair, and sent M’Todd,
who came in at the moment, to fetch the doctor.

Dr Oakes was a big man with a breezy
manner, the sort of doctor who hits you with the force
of a sledge-hammer in the small ribs, and asks you
if you felt anything then.  It was on this
principle that he acted with regard to Barry’s
ankle.  He seized it in both hands and gave it
a wrench.

“Did that hurt?” he inquired anxiously.

Barry turned white, and replied that it did.

Dr Oakes nodded wisely.

“Ah!  H’m!  Just so.  ’Myes. 
Ah.”

“Is it bad?” asked Drummond, awed by these
mystic utterances.

“My dear boy,” replied
the doctor, breezily, “it is always bad when
one twists one’s ankle.”

“How long will it do me out of footer?”
asked Barry.

“How long?  How long? 
How long?  Why, fortnight.  Fortnight,”
said the doctor.

“Then I shan’t be able to play next Saturday?”

“Next Saturday?  Next Saturday? 
My dear boy, if you can put your foot to the ground
by next Saturday, you may take it as evidence that
the age of miracles is not past.  Next Saturday,
indeed!  Ha, ha.”

It was not altogether his fault that
he treated the matter with such brutal levity. 
It was a long time since he had been at school, and
he could not quite realise what it meant to Barry
not to be able to play against Ripton.  As for
Barry, he felt that he had never loathed and detested
any one so thoroughly as he loathed and detested Dr
Oakes at that moment.

“I don’t see where the
joke comes in,” said Clowes, when he had gone. 
“I bar that man.”

“He’s a beast,”
said Drummond.  “I can’t understand
why they let a tout like that be the school doctor.”

Barry said nothing.  He was too sore for words.

What Dr Oakes said to his wife that
evening was:  “Over at the school, my dear,
this afternoon.  This afternoon.  Boy with
a twisted ankle.  Nice young fellow.  Very
much put out when I told him he could not play football
for a fortnight.  But I chaffed him, and cheered
him up in no time.  I cheered him up in no time,
my dear.”

“I’m sure you did, dear,”
said Mrs Oakes.  Which shows how differently the
same thing may strike different people.  Barry
certainly did not look as if he had been cheered up
when Clowes left the study and went over to tell Trevor
that he would have to find a substitute for his right
wing three-quarter against Ripton.

Trevor had left the field without
noticing Barry’s accident, and he was tremendously
pleased at the result of the game.

“Good man,” he said, when
Clowes came in, “you saved the match.”

“And lost the Ripton match probably,”
said Clowes, gloomily.

“What do you mean?”

“That last time I brought down
Barry I crocked him.  He’s in his study
now with a sprained ankle.  I’ve just come
from there.  Oakes has seen him, and says he mustn’t
play for a fortnight.”

“Great Scott!” said Trevor,
blankly.  “What on earth shall we do?”

“Why not move Strachan up to
the wing, and put somebody else back instead of him? 
Strachan is a good wing.”

Trevor shook his head.

“No.  There’s nobody
good enough to play back for the first.  We mustn’t
risk it.”

“Then I suppose it must be Rand-Brown?”

“I suppose so.”

“He may do better than we think. 
He played quite a decent game today.  That try
he got wasn’t half a bad one.”

“He’d be all right if
he didn’t funk.  But perhaps he wouldn’t
funk against Ripton.  In a match like that anybody
would play up.  I’ll ask Milton and Allardyce
about it.”

“I shouldn’t go to Milton
today,” said Clowes.  “I fancy he’ll
want a night’s rest before he’s fit to
talk to.  He must be a bit sick about this match. 
I know he expected Seymour’s to win.”

He went out, but came back almost immediately.

“I say,” he said, “there’s
one thing that’s just occurred to me.  This’ll
please the League.  I mean, this ankle business
of Barry’s.”

The same idea had struck Trevor. 
It was certainly a respite.  But he regretted
it for all that.  What he wanted was to beat Ripton,
and Barry’s absence would weaken the team. 
However, it was good in its way, and cleared the atmosphere
for the time.  The League would hardly do anything
with regard to the carrying out of their threat while
Barry was on the sick-list.

Next day, having given him time to
get over the bitterness of defeat in accordance with
Clowes’ thoughtful suggestion, Trevor called
on Milton, and asked him what his opinion was on the
subject of the inclusion of Rand-Brown in the first
fifteen in place of Barry.

“He’s the next best man,”
he added, in defence of the proposal.

“I suppose so,” said Milton. 
“He’d better play, I suppose.  There’s
no one else.”

“Clowes thought it wouldn’t
be a bad idea to shove Strachan on the wing, and put
somebody else back.”

“Who is there to put?”

“Jervis?”

“Not good enough.  No, it’s
better to be weakish on the wing than at back. 
Besides, Rand-Brown may do all right.  He played
well against you.”

“Yes,” said Trevor. 
“Study looks a bit better now,” he added,
as he was going, having looked round the room. 
“Still a bit bare, though.”

Milton sighed.  “It will never be what it
was.”

“Forty-three theatrical photographs
want some replacing, of course,” said Trevor. 
“But it isn’t bad, considering.”

“How’s yours?”

“Oh, mine’s all right, except for the
absence of photographs.”

“I say, Trevor.”

“Yes?” said Trevor, stopping
at the door.  Milton’s voice had taken on
the tone of one who is about to disclose dreadful secrets.

“Would you like to know what I think?”

“What?”

“Why, I’m pretty nearly sure who it was
that ragged my study?”

“By Jove!  What have you done to him?”

“Nothing as yet.  I’m not quite sure
of my man.”

“Who is the man?”

“Rand-Brown.”

“By Jove!  Clowes once said
he thought Rand-Brown must be the President of the
League.  But then, I don’t see how you can
account for my study being wrecked.  He
was out on the field when it was done.”

“Why, the League, of course. 
You don’t suppose he’s the only man in
it?  There must be a lot of them.”

“But what makes you think it was Rand-Brown?”

Milton told him the story of Shoeblossom,
as Barry had told it to him.  The only difference
was that Trevor listened without any of the scepticism
which Milton had displayed on hearing it.  He was
getting excited.  It all fitted in so neatly. 
If ever there was circumstantial evidence against
a man, here it was against Rand-Brown.  Take the
two cases.  Milton had quarrelled with him. 
Milton’s study was wrecked “with the compliments
of the League”.  Trevor had turned him out
of the first fifteen.  Trevor’s study was
wrecked “with the compliments of the League”. 
As Clowes had pointed out, the man with the most obvious
motive for not wishing Barry to play for the school
was Rand-Brown.  It seemed a true bill.

“I shouldn’t wonder if
you’re right,” he said, “but of course
one can’t do anything yet.  You want a lot
more evidence.  Anyhow, we must play him against
Ripton, I suppose.  Which is his study?  I’ll
go and tell him now.”

“Ten.”

Trevor knocked at the door of study
Ten.  Rand-Brown was sitting over the fire, reading. 
He jumped up when he saw that it was Trevor who had
come in, and to his visitor it seemed that his face
wore a guilty look.

“What do you want?” said Rand-Brown.

It was not the politest way of welcoming
a visitor.  It increased Trevor’s suspicions. 
The man was afraid.  A great idea darted into his
mind.  Why not go straight to the point and have
it out with him here and now?  He had the League’s
letter about the bat in his pocket.  He would
confront him with it and insist on searching the study
there and then.  If Rand-Brown were really, as
he suspected, the writer of the letter, the bat must
be in this room somewhere.  Search it now, and
he would have no time to hide it.  He pulled out
the letter.

“I believe you wrote that,” he said.

Trevor was always direct.

Rand-Brown seemed to turn a little
pale, but his voice when he replied was quite steady.

“That’s a lie,” he said.

“Then, perhaps,” said Trevor, “you
wouldn’t object to proving it.”

“How?”

“By letting me search your study?”

“You don’t believe my word?”

“Why should I?  You don’t believe
mine.”

Rand-Brown made no comment on this remark.

“Was that what you came here for?” he
asked.

“No,” said Trevor; “as
a matter of fact, I came to tell you to turn out for
running and passing with the first tomorrow afternoon. 
You’re playing against Ripton on Saturday.”

Rand-Brown’s attitude underwent
a complete transformation at the news.  He became
friendliness itself.

“All right,” he said. 
“I say, I’m sorry I said what I did about
lying.  I was rather sick that you should think
I wrote that rot you showed me.  I hope you don’t
mind.”

“Not a bit.  Do you mind my searching your
study?”

For a moment Rand-Brown looked vicious.  Then
he sat down with a laugh.

“Go on,” he said; “I
see you don’t believe me.  Here are the keys
if you want them.”

Trevor thanked him, and took the keys. 
He opened every drawer and examined the writing-desk. 
The bat was in none of these places.  He looked
in the cupboards.  No bat there.

“Like to take up the carpet?” inquired
Rand-Brown.

“No, thanks.”

“Search me if you like.  Shall I turn out
my pockets?”

“Yes, please,” said Trevor,
to his surprise.  He had not expected to be taken
literally.

Rand-Brown emptied them, but the bat
was not there.  Trevor turned to go.

“You’ve not looked inside
the legs of the chairs yet,” said Rand-Brown. 
“They may be hollow.  There’s no knowing.”

“It doesn’t matter, thanks,”
said Trevor.  “Sorry for troubling you. 
Don’t forget tomorrow afternoon.”

And he went, with the very unpleasant
feeling that he had been badly scored off.

XVI

THE RIPTON MATCH

It was a curious thing in connection
with the matches between Ripton and Wrykyn, that Ripton
always seemed to be the bigger team.  They always
had a gigantic pack of forwards, who looked capable
of shoving a hole through one of the pyramids. 
Possibly they looked bigger to the Wrykinians than
they really were.  Strangers always look big on
the football field.  When you have grown accustomed
to a person’s appearance, he does not look nearly
so large.  Milton, for instance, never struck
anybody at Wrykyn as being particularly big for a school
forward, and yet today he was the heaviest man on the
field by a quarter of a stone.  But, taken in
the mass, the Ripton pack were far heavier than their
rivals.  There was a legend current among the lower
forms at Wrykyn that fellows were allowed to stop on
at Ripton till they were twenty-five, simply to play
football.  This is scarcely likely to have been
based on fact.  Few lower form legends are.

Jevons, the Ripton captain, through
having played opposite Trevor for three seasons—­he
was the Ripton left centre-three-quarter—­had
come to be quite an intimate of his.  Trevor had
gone down with Milton and Allardyce to meet the team
at the station, and conduct them up to the school.

“How have you been getting on
since Christmas?” asked Jevons.

“Pretty well.  We’ve lost Paget, I
suppose you know?”

“That was the fast man on the wing, wasn’t
it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ve lost a man, too.”

“Oh, yes, that red-haired forward.  I remember
him.”

“It ought to make us pretty even.  What’s
the ground like?”

“Bit greasy, I should think.  We had some
rain late last night.”

The ground was a bit greasy. 
So was the ball.  When Milton kicked off up the
hill with what wind there was in his favour, the outsides
of both teams found it difficult to hold the ball. 
Jevons caught it on his twenty-five line, and promptly
handed it forward.  The first scrum was formed
in the heart of the enemy’s country.

A deep, swelling roar from either
touch-line greeted the school’s advantage. 
A feature of a big match was always the shouting. 
It rarely ceased throughout the whole course of the
game, the monotonous but impressive sound of five
hundred voices all shouting the same word.  It
was worth hearing.  Sometimes the evenness of the
noise would change to an excited crescendo
as a school three-quarter got off, or the school back
pulled up the attack with a fine piece of defence. 
Sometimes the shouting would give place to clapping
when the school was being pressed and somebody had
found touch with a long kick.  But mostly the
man on the ropes roared steadily and without cessation,
and with the full force of his lungs, the word “Wrykyn!”

The scrum was a long one.  For
two minutes the forwards heaved and strained, now
one side, now the other, gaining a few inches. 
The Wrykyn pack were doing all they knew to heel,
but their opponents’ superior weight was telling. 
Ripton had got the ball, and were keeping it. 
Their game was to break through with it and rush. 
Then suddenly one of their forwards kicked it on,
and just at that moment the opposition of the Wrykyn
pack gave way, and the scrum broke up.  The ball
came out on the Wrykyn side, and Allardyce whipped
it out to Deacon, who was playing half with him.

“Ball’s out,” cried
the Ripton half who was taking the scrum.  “Break
up.  It’s out.”

And his colleague on the left darted
across to stop Trevor, who had taken Deacon’s
pass, and was running through on the right.

Trevor ran splendidly.  He was
a three-quarter who took a lot of stopping when he
once got away.  Jevons and the Ripton half met
him almost simultaneously, and each slackened his
pace for the fraction of a second, to allow the other
to tackle.  As they hesitated, Trevor passed them. 
He had long ago learned that to go hard when you have
once started is the thing that pays.

He could see that Rand-Brown was racing
up for the pass, and, as he reached the back, he sent
the ball to him, waist-high.  Then the back got
to him, and he came down with a thud, with a vision,
seen from the corner of his eye, of the ball bounding
forward out of the wing three-quarter’s hands
into touch.  Rand-Brown had bungled the pass in
the old familiar way, and lost a certain try.

The touch-judge ran up with his flag
waving in the air, but the referee had other views.

“Knocked on inside,” he said; “scrum
here.”

“Here” was, Trevor saw
with unspeakable disgust, some three yards from the
goal-line.  Rand-Brown had only had to take the
pass, and he must have scored.

The Ripton forwards were beginning
to find their feet better now, and they carried the
scrum.  A truculent-looking warrior in one of those
ear-guards which are tied on by strings underneath
the chin, and which add fifty per cent to the ferocity
of a forward’s appearance, broke away with the
ball at his feet, and swept down the field with the
rest of the pack at his heels.  Trevor arrived
too late to pull up the rush, which had gone straight
down the right touch-line, and it was not till Strachan
fell on the ball on the Wrykyn twenty-five line that
the danger ceased to threaten.

Even now the school were in a bad
way.  The enemy were pressing keenly, and a real
piece of combination among their three-quarters would
only too probably end in a try.  Fortunately for
them, Allardyce and Deacon were a better pair of halves
than the couple they were marking.  Also, the
Ripton forwards heeled slowly, and Allardyce had generally
got his man safely buried in the mud before he could
pass.

He was just getting round for the
tenth time to bottle his opponent as before, when
he slipped.  When the ball came out he was on all
fours, and the Ripton exponent, finding to his great
satisfaction that he had not been tackled, whipped
the ball out on the left, where a wing three-quarter
hovered.

This was the man Rand-Brown was supposed
to be marking, and once again did Barry’s substitute
prove of what stuff his tackling powers were made. 
After his customary moment of hesitation, he had at
the Riptonian’s neck.  The Riptonian handed
him off in a manner that recalled the palmy days of
the old Prize Ring—­handing off was always
slightly vigorous in the Ripton v. Wrykyn match—­and
dashed over the line in the extreme corner.

There was anguish on the two touch-lines. 
Trevor looked savage, but made no comment.  The
team lined up in silence.

It takes a very good kick to convert
a try from the touch-line.  Jevons’ kick
was a long one, but it fell short.  Ripton led
by a try to nothing.

A few more scrums near the halfway
line, and a fine attempt at a dropped goal by the
Ripton back, and it was half-time, with the score
unaltered.

During the interval there were lemons. 
An excellent thing is your lemon at half-time. 
It cools the mouth, quenches the thirst, stimulates
the desire to be at them again, and improves the play.

Possibly the Wrykyn team had been
happier in their choice of lemons on this occasion,
for no sooner had the game been restarted than Clowes
ran the whole length of the field, dodged through the
three-quarters, punted over the back’s head,
and scored a really brilliant try, of the sort that
Paget had been fond of scoring in the previous term. 
The man on the touch-line brightened up wonderfully,
and began to try and calculate the probable score
by the end of the game, on the assumption that, as
a try had been scored in the first two minutes, ten
would be scored in the first twenty, and so on.

But the calculations were based on
false premises.  After Strachan had failed to
convert, and the game had been resumed with the score
at one try all, play settled down in the centre, and
neither side could pierce the other’s defence. 
Once Jevons got off for Ripton, but Trevor brought
him down safely, and once Rand-Brown let his man through,
as before, but Strachan was there to meet him, and
the effort came to nothing.  For Wrykyn, no one
did much except tackle.  The forwards were beaten
by the heavier pack, and seldom let the ball out. 
Allardyce intercepted a pass when about ten minutes
of play remained, and ran through to the back. 
But the back, who was a capable man and in his third
season in the team, laid him low scientifically before
he could reach the line.

Altogether it looked as if the match
were going to end in a draw.  The Wrykyn defence,
with the exception of Rand-Brown, was too good to be
penetrated, while the Ripton forwards, by always getting
the ball in the scrums, kept them from attacking. 
It was about five minutes from the end of the game
when the Ripton right centre-three-quarter, in trying
to punt across to the wing, miskicked and sent the
ball straight into the hands of Trevor’s colleague
in the centre.  Before his man could get round
to him he had slipped through, with Trevor backing
him up.  The back, as a good back should, seeing
two men coming at him, went for the man with the ball. 
But by the time he had brought him down, the ball
was no longer where it had originally been.  Trevor
had got it, and was running in between the posts.

This time Strachan put on the extra
two points without difficulty.

Ripton played their hardest for the
remaining minutes, but without result.  The game
ended with Wrykyn a goal ahead—­a goal and
a try to a try.  For the second time in one season
the Ripton match had ended in a victory—­a
thing it was very rarely in the habit of doing.

       *     *     *     *     *

The senior day-room at Seymour’s
rejoiced considerably that night.  The air was
dark with flying cushions, and darker still, occasionally,
when the usual humorist turned the gas out.  Milton
was out, for he had gone to the dinner which followed
the Ripton match, and the man in command of the house
in his absence was Mill.  And the senior day-room
had no respect whatever for Mill.

Barry joined in the revels as well
as his ankle would let him, but he was not feeling
happy.  The disappointment of being out of the
first still weighed on him.

At about eight, when things were beginning
to grow really lively, and the noise seemed likely
to crack the window at any moment, the door was flung
open and Milton stalked in.

“What’s all this row?” he inquired. 
“Stop it at once.”

As a matter of fact, the row had stopped—­directly
he came in.

“Is Barry here?” he asked.

“Yes,” said that youth.

“Congratulate you on your first,
Barry.  We’ve just had a meeting and given
you your colours.  Trevor told me to tell you.”

XVII

THE WATCHERS IN THE VAULT

For the next three seconds you could
have heard a cannonball drop.  And that was equivalent,
in the senior day-room at Seymour’s, to a dead
silence.  Barry stood in the middle of the room
leaning on the stick on which he supported life, now
that his ankle had been injured, and turned red and
white in regular rotation, as the magnificence of the
news came home to him.

Then the small voice of Linton was heard.

“That’ll be six d. 
I’ll trouble you for, young Sammy,” said
Linton.  For he had betted an even sixpence with
Master Samuel Menzies that Barry would get his first
fifteen cap this term, and Barry had got it.

A great shout went up from every corner
of the room.  Barry was one of the most popular
members of the house, and every one had been sorry
for him when his sprained ankle had apparently put
him out of the running for the last cap.

“Good old Barry,” said
Drummond, delightedly.  Barry thanked him in a
dazed way.

Every one crowded in to shake his
hand.  Barry thanked then all in a dazed way.

And then the senior day-room, in spite
of the fact that Milton had returned, gave itself
up to celebrating the occasion with one of the most
deafening uproars that had ever been heard even in
that factory of noise.  A babel of voices discussed
the match of the afternoon, each trying to outshout
the other.  In one corner Linton was beating wildly
on a biscuit-tin with part of a broken chair. 
Shoeblossom was busy in the opposite corner executing
an intricate step-dance on somebody else’s box. 
M’Todd had got hold of the red-hot poker, and
was burning his initials in huge letters on the seat
of a chair.  Every one, in short, was enjoying
himself, and it was not until an advanced hour that
comparative quiet was restored.  It was a great
evening for Barry, the best he had ever experienced.

Clowes did not learn the news till
he saw it on the notice-board, on the following Monday. 
When he saw it he whistled softly.

“I see you’ve given Barry
his first,” he said to Trevor, when they met. 
“Rather sensational.”

“Milton and Allardyce both thought
he deserved it.  If he’d been playing instead
of Rand-Brown, they wouldn’t have scored at all
probably, and we should have got one more try.”

“That’s all right,”
said Clowes.  “He deserves it right enough,
and I’m jolly glad you’ve given it him. 
But things will begin to move now, don’t you
think?  The League ought to have a word to say
about the business.  It’ll be a facer for
them.”

“Do you remember,” asked
Trevor, “saying that you thought it must be
Rand-Brown who wrote those letters?”

“Yes.  Well?”

“Well, Milton had an idea that it was Rand-Brown
who ragged his study.”

“What made him think that?”

Trevor related the Shoeblossom incident.

Clowes became quite excited.

“Then Rand-Brown must be the
man,” he said.  “Why don’t you
go and tackle him?  Probably he’s got the
bat in his study.”

“It’s not in his study,”
said Trevor, “because I looked everywhere for
it, and got him to turn out his pockets, too. 
And yet I’ll swear he knows something about
it.  One thing struck me as a bit suspicious. 
I went straight into his study and showed him that
last letter—­about the bat, you know, and
accused him of writing it.  Now, if he hadn’t
been in the business somehow, he wouldn’t have
understood what was meant by their saying ‘the
bat you lost’.  It might have been an ordinary
cricket-bat for all he knew.  But he offered to
let me search the study.  It didn’t strike
me as rum till afterwards.  Then it seemed fishy. 
What do you think?”

Clowes thought so too, but admitted
that he did not see of what use the suspicion was
going to be.  Whether Rand-Brown knew anything
about the affair or not, it was quite certain that
the bat was not with him.

O’Hara, meanwhile, had decided
that the time had come for him to resume his detective
duties.  Moriarty agreed with him, and they resolved
that that night they would patronise the vault instead
of the gymnasium, and take a holiday as far as their
boxing was concerned.  There was plenty of time
before the Aldershot competition.

Lock-up was still at six, so at a
quarter to that hour they slipped down into the vault,
and took up their position.

A quarter of an hour passed. 
The lock-up bell sounded faintly.  Moriarty began
to grow tired.

“Is it worth it?” he said,
“an’ wouldn’t they have come before,
if they meant to come?”

“We’ll give them another
quarter of an hour,” said O’Hara. 
“After that—­”

“Sh!” whispered Moriarty.

The door had opened.  They could
see a figure dimly outlined in the semi-darkness. 
Footsteps passed down into the vault, and there came
a sound as if the unknown had cannoned into a chair,
followed by a sharp intake of breath, expressive of
pain.  A scraping sound, and a flash of light,
and part of the vault was lit by a candle.  O’Hara
caught a glimpse of the unknown’s face as he
rose from lighting the candle, but it was not enough
to enable him to recognise him.  The candle was
standing on a chair, and the light it gave was too
feeble to reach the face of any one not on a level
with it.

The unknown began to drag chairs out
into the neighbourhood of the light.  O’Hara
counted six.

The sixth chair had scarcely been
placed in position when the door opened again. 
Six other figures appeared in the opening one after
the other, and bolted into the vault like rabbits
into a burrow.  The last of them closed the door
after them.

O’Hara nudged Moriarty, and
Moriarty nudged O’Hara; but neither made a sound. 
They were not likely to be seen—­the blackness
of the vault was too Egyptian for that—­but
they were so near to the chairs that the least whisper
must have been heard.  Not a word had proceeded
from the occupants of the chairs so far.  If O’Hara’s
suspicion was correct, and this was really the League
holding a meeting, their methods were more secret
than those of any other secret society in existence. 
Even the Nihilists probably exchanged a few remarks
from time to time, when they met together to plot. 
But these men of mystery never opened their lips. 
It puzzled O’Hara.

The light of the candle was obscured
for a moment, and a sound of puffing came from the
darkness.

O’Hara nudged Moriarty again.

“Smoking!” said the nudge.

Moriarty nudged O’Hara.

“Smoking it is!” was the meaning of the
movement.

A strong smell of tobacco showed that
the diagnosis had been a true one.  Each of the
figures in turn lit his pipe at the candle, and sat
back, still in silence.  It could not have been
very pleasant, smoking in almost pitch darkness, but
it was breaking rules, which was probably the main
consideration that swayed the smokers.  They puffed
away steadily, till the two Irishmen were wrapped
about in invisible clouds.

Then a strange thing happened. 
I know that I am infringing copyright in making that
statement, but it so exactly suits the occurrence,
that perhaps Mr Rider Haggard will not object. 
It was a strange thing that happened.

A rasping voice shattered the silence.

“You boys down there,”
said the voice, “come here immediately. 
Come here, I say.”

It was the well-known voice of Mr
Robert Dexter, O’Hara and Moriarty’s beloved
house-master.

The two Irishmen simultaneously clutched
one another, each afraid that the other would think—­from
force of long habit—­that the house-master
was speaking to him.  Both stood where they were. 
It was the men of mystery and tobacco that Dexter
was after, they thought.

But they were wrong.  What had
brought Dexter to the vault was the fact that he had
seen two boys, who looked uncommonly like O’Hara
and Moriarty, go down the steps of the vault at a
quarter to six.  He had been doing his usual after-lock-up
prowl on the junior gravel, to intercept stragglers,
and he had been a witness—­from a distance
of fifty yards, in a very bad light—­of
the descent into the vault.  He had remained on
the gravel ever since, in the hope of catching them
as they came up; but as they had not come up, he had
determined to make the first move himself.  He
had not seen the six unknowns go down, for, the evening
being chilly, he had paced up and down, and they had
by a lucky accident chosen a moment when his back
was turned.

“Come up immediately,” he repeated.

Here a blast of tobacco-smoke rushed
at him from the darkness.  The candle had been
extinguished at the first alarm, and he had not realised—­though
he had suspected it—­that smoking had been
going on.

A hurried whispering was in progress
among the unknowns.  Apparently they saw that
the game was up, for they picked their way towards
the door.

As each came up the steps and passed
him, Mr Dexter observed “Ha!” and appeared
to make a note of his name.  The last of the six
was just leaving him after this process had been completed,
when Mr Dexter called him back.

“That is not all,” he said, suspiciously.

“Yes, sir,” said the last of the unknowns.

Neither of the Irishmen recognised
the voice.  Its owner was a stranger to them.

“I tell you it is not,”
snapped Mr Dexter.  “You are concealing the
truth from me.  O’Hara and Moriarty are down
there—­two boys in my own house.  I
saw them go down there.”

“They had nothing to do with
us, sir.  We saw nothing of them.”

“I have no doubt,” said
the house-master, “that you imagine that you
are doing a very chivalrous thing by trying to hide
them, but you will gain nothing by it.  You may
go.”

He came to the top of the steps, and
it seemed as if he intended to plunge into the darkness
in search of the suspects.  But, probably realising
the futility of such a course, he changed his mind,
and delivered an ultimatum from the top step.

“O’Hara and Moriarty.”

No reply.

“O’Hara and Moriarty,
I know perfectly well that you are down there. 
Come up immediately.”

Dignified silence from the vault.

“Well, I shall wait here till
you do choose to come up.  You would be well advised
to do so immediately.  I warn you you will not
tire me out.”

He turned, and the door slammed behind him.

“What’ll we do?” whispered Moriarty. 
It was at last safe to whisper.

“Wait,” said O’Hara, “I’m
thinking.”

O’Hara thought.  For many
minutes he thought in vain.  At last there came
flooding back into his mind a memory of the days of
his faghood.  It was after that that he had been
groping all the time.  He remembered now. 
Once in those days there had been an unexpected function
in the middle of term.  There were needed for
that function certain chairs.  He could recall
even now his furious disgust when he and a select body
of fellow fags had been pounced upon by their form-master,
and coerced into forming a line from the junior block
to the cloisters, for the purpose of handing chairs. 
True, his form-master had stood ginger-beer after the
event, with princely liberality, but the labour was
of the sort that gallons of ginger-beer will not make
pleasant.  But he ceased to regret the episode
now.  He had been at the extreme end of the chair-handling
chain.  He had stood in a passage in the junior
block, just by the door that led to the masters’
garden, and which—­he remembered—­was
never locked till late at night.  And while he
stood there, a pair of hands—­apparently
without a body—­had heaved up chair after
chair through a black opening in the floor.  In
other words, a trap-door connected with the vault in
which he now was.

He imparted these reminiscences of
childhood to Moriarty.  They set off to search
for the missing door, and, after wanderings and barkings
of shins too painful to relate, they found it. 
Moriarty lit a match.  The light fell on the trap-door,
and their last doubts were at an end.  The thing
opened inwards.  The bolt was on their side, not
in the passage above them.  To shoot the bolt
took them one second, to climb into the passage one
minute.  They stood at the side of the opening,
and dusted their clothes.

“Bedad!” said Moriarty, suddenly.

“What?”

“Why, how are we to shut it?”

This was a problem that wanted some
solving.  Eventually they managed it, O’Hara
leaning over and fishing for it, while Moriarty held
his legs.

As luck would have it—­and
luck had stood by them well all through—­there
was a bolt on top of the trap-door, as well as beneath
it.

“Supposing that had been shot!”
said O’Hara, as they fastened the door in its
place.

Moriarty did not care to suppose anything so unpleasant.

Mr Dexter was still prowling about
on the junior gravel, when the two Irishmen ran round
and across the senior gravel to the gymnasium. 
Here they put in a few minutes’ gentle sparring,
and then marched boldly up to Mr Day (who happened
to have looked in five minutes after their arrival)
and got their paper.

“What time did O’Hara
and Moriarty arrive at the gymnasium?” asked
Mr Dexter of Mr Day next morning.

“O’Hara and Moriarty? 
Really, I can’t remember.  I know they left
at about a quarter to seven.”

That profound thinker, Mr Tony Weller,
was never so correct as in his views respecting the
value of an alibi.  There are few better
things in an emergency.

XVIII

O’HARA EXCELS HIMSELF

It was Renford’s turn next morning
to get up and feed the ferrets.  Harvey had done
it the day before.

Renford was not a youth who enjoyed
early rising, but in the cause of the ferrets he would
have endured anything, so at six punctually he slid
out of bed, dressed quietly, so as not to disturb the
rest of the dormitory, and ran over to the vault. 
To his utter amazement he found it locked.  Such
a thing had never been done before in the whole course
of his experience.  He tugged at the handle, but
not an inch or a fraction of an inch would the door
yield.  The policy of the Open Door had ceased
to find favour in the eyes of the authorities.

A feeling of blank despair seized
upon him.  He thought of the dismay of the ferrets
when they woke up and realised that there was no chance
of breakfast for them.  And then they would gradually
waste away, and some day somebody would go down to
the vault to fetch chairs, and would come upon two
mouldering skeletons, and wonder what they had once
been.  He almost wept at the vision so conjured
up.

There was nobody about.  Perhaps
he might break in somehow.  But then there was
nothing to get to work with.  He could not kick
the door down.  No, he must give it up, and the
ferrets’ breakfast-hour must be postponed. 
Possibly Harvey might be able to think of something.

“Fed ’em?” inquired Harvey, when
they met at breakfast.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why on earth not?  You didn’t oversleep
yourself?”

Renford poured his tale into his friend’s shocked
ears.

“My hat!” said Harvey,
when he had finished, “what on earth are we to
do?  They’ll starve.”

Renford nodded mournfully.

“Whatever made them go and lock the door?”
he said.

He seemed to think the authorities
should have given him due notice of such an action.

“You’re sure they have locked it? 
It isn’t only stuck or something?”

“I lugged at the handle for
hours.  But you can go and see for yourself if
you like.”

Harvey went, and, waiting till the
coast was clear, attached himself to the handle with
a prehensile grasp, and put his back into one strenuous
tug.  It was even as Renford had said.  The
door was locked beyond possibility of doubt.

Renford and he went over to school
that morning with long faces and a general air of
acute depression.  It was perhaps fortunate for
their purpose that they did, for had their appearance
been normal it might not have attracted O’Hara’s
attention.  As it was, the Irishman, meeting them
on the junior gravel, stopped and asked them what was
wrong.  Since the adventure in the vault, he had
felt an interest in Renford and Harvey.

The two told their story in alternate
sentences like the Strophe and Antistrophe of a Greek
chorus. ("Steichomuthics,” your Greek scholar
calls it, I fancy.  Ha, yes!  Just so.)

“So ye can’t get in because
they’ve locked the door, an’ ye don’t
know what to do about it?” said O’Hara,
at the conclusion of the narrative.

Renford and Harvey informed him in
chorus that that was the state of the game
up to present date.

“An’ ye want me to get them out for you?”

Neither had dared to hope that he
would go so far as this.  What they had looked
for had been at the most a few thoughtful words of
advice.  That such a master-strategist as O’Hara
should take up their cause was an unexampled piece
of good luck.

“If you only would,” said Harvey.

“We should be most awfully obliged,” said
Renford.

“Very well,” said O’Hara.

They thanked him profusely.

O’Hara replied that it would be a privilege.

He should be sorry, he said, to have anything happen
to the ferrets.

Renford and Harvey went on into school
feeling more cheerful.  If the ferrets could be
extracted from their present tight corner, O’Hara
was the man to do it.

O’Hara had not made his offer
of assistance in any spirit of doubt.  He was
certain that he could do what he had promised. 
For it had not escaped his memory that this was a
Tuesday—­in other words, a mathematics morning
up to the quarter to eleven interval.  That meant,
as has been explained previously, that, while the rest
of the school were in the form-rooms, he would be
out in the passage, if he cared to be.  There
would be no witnesses to what he was going to do.

But, by that curious perversity of
fate which is so often noticeable, Mr Banks was in
a peculiarly lamb-like and long-suffering mood this
morning.  Actions for which O’Hara would
on other days have been expelled from the room without
hope of return, today were greeted with a mild “Don’t
do that, please, O’Hara,” or even the ridiculously
inadequate “O’Hara!” It was perfectly
disheartening.  O’Hara began to ask himself
bitterly what was the use of ragging at all if this
was how it was received.  And the moments were
flying, and his promise to Renford and Harvey still
remained unfulfilled.

He prepared for fresh efforts.

So desperate was he, that he even
resorted to crude methods like the throwing of paper
balls and the dropping of books.  And when your
really scientific ragger sinks to this, he is nearing
the end of his tether.  O’Hara hated to
be rude, but there seemed no help for it.

The striking of a quarter past ten
improved his chances.  It had been privily agreed
upon beforehand amongst the members of the class that
at a quarter past ten every one was to sneeze simultaneously. 
The noise startled Mr Banks considerably.  The
angelic mood began to wear off.  A man may be
long-suffering, but he likes to draw the line somewhere.

“Another exhibition like that,”
he said, sharply, “and the class stays in after
school, O’Hara!”

“Sir?”

“Silence.”

“I said nothing, sir, really.”

“Boy, you made a cat-like noise with your mouth.”

“What sort of noise, sir?”

The form waited breathlessly. 
This peculiarly insidious question had been invented
for mathematical use by one Sandys, who had left at
the end of the previous summer.  It was but rarely
that the master increased the gaiety of nations by
answering the question in the manner desired.

Mr Banks, off his guard, fell into the trap.

“A noise like this,” he
said curtly, and to the delighted audience came the
melodious sound of a “Mi-aou”, which put
O’Hara’s effort completely in the shade,
and would have challenged comparison with the war-cry
of the stoutest mouser that ever trod a tile.

A storm of imitations arose from all
parts of the room.  Mr Banks turned pink, and,
going straight to the root of the disturbance, forthwith
evicted O’Hara.

O’Hara left with the satisfying
feeling that his duty had been done.

Mr Banks’ room was at the top
of the middle block.  He ran softly down the stairs
at his best pace.  It was not likely that the master
would come out into the passage to see if he was still
there, but it might happen, and it would be best to
run as few risks as possible.

He sprinted over to the junior block,
raised the trap-door, and jumped down.  He knew
where the ferrets had been placed, and had no difficulty
in finding them.  In another minute he was in the
passage again, with the trap-door bolted behind him.

He now asked himself—­what
should he do with them?  He must find a safe place,
or his labours would have been in vain.

Behind the fives-court, he thought,
would be the spot.  Nobody ever went there. 
It meant a run of three hundred yards there and the
same distance back, and there was more than a chance
that he might be seen by one of the Powers.  In
which case he might find it rather hard to explain
what he was doing in the middle of the grounds with
a couple of ferrets in his possession when the hands
of the clock pointed to twenty minutes to eleven.

But the odds were against his being seen.  He
risked it.

When the bell rang for the quarter
to eleven interval the ferrets were in their new home,
happily discussing a piece of meat—­Renford’s
contribution, held over from the morning’s meal,—­and
O’Hara, looking as if he had never left the
passage for an instant, was making his way through
the departing mathematical class to apologise handsomely
to Mr Banks—­as was his invariable custom—­for
his disgraceful behaviour during the morning’s
lesson.

XIX

THE MAYOR’S VISIT

School prefects at Wrykyn did weekly
essays for the headmaster.  Those who had got
their scholarships at the ’Varsity, or who were
going up in the following year, used to take their
essays to him after school and read them to him—­an
unpopular and nerve-destroying practice, akin to suicide. 
Trevor had got his scholarship in the previous November. 
He was due at the headmaster’s private house
at six o’clock on the present Tuesday. 
He was looking forward to the ordeal not without apprehension. 
The essay subject this week had been “One man’s
meat is another man’s poison”, and Clowes,
whose idea of English Essay was that it should be
a medium for intempestive frivolity, had insisted
on his beginning with, “While I cannot conscientiously
go so far as to say that one man’s meat is another
man’s poison, yet I am certainly of opinion that
what is highly beneficial to one man may, on the other
hand, to another man, differently constituted, be
extremely deleterious, and, indeed, absolutely fatal.”

Trevor was not at all sure how the
headmaster would take it.  But Clowes had seemed
so cut up at his suggestion that it had better be omitted,
that he had allowed it to stand.

He was putting the final polish on
this gem of English literature at half-past five,
when Milton came in.

“Busy?” said Milton.

Trevor said he would be through in a minute.

Milton took a chair, and waited.

Trevor scratched out two words and
substituted two others, made a couple of picturesque
blots, and, laying down his pen, announced that he
had finished.

“What’s up?” he said.

“It’s about the League,” said Milton.

“Found out anything?”

“Not anything much.  But
I’ve been making inquiries.  You remember
I asked you to let me look at those letters of yours?”

Trevor nodded.  This had happened on the Sunday
of that week.

“Well, I wanted to look at the post-marks.”

“By Jove, I never thought of that.”

Milton continued with the business-like
air of the detective who explains in the last chapter
of the book how he did it.

“I found, as I thought, that both letters came
from the same place.”

Trevor pulled out the letters in question. 
“So they do,” he said, “Chesterton.”

“Do you know Chesterton?” asked Milton.

“Only by name.”

“It’s a small hamlet about
two miles from here across the downs.  There’s
only one shop in the place, which acts as post-office
and tobacconist and everything else.  I thought
that if I went there and asked about those letters,
they might remember who it was that sent them, if
I showed them a photograph.”

“By Jove,” said Trevor, “of course! 
Did you?  What happened?”

“I went there yesterday afternoon. 
I took about half-a-dozen photographs of various chaps,
including Rand-Brown.”

“But wait a bit.  If Chesterton’s
two miles off, Rand-Brown couldn’t have sent
the letters.  He wouldn’t have the time after
school.  He was on the grounds both the afternoons
before I got the letters.”

“I know,” said Milton;
“I didn’t think of that at the time.”

“Well?”

“One of the points about the
Chesterton post-office is that there’s no letter-box
outside.  You have to go into the shop and hand
anything you want to post across the counter. 
I thought this was a tremendous score for me. 
I thought they would be bound to remember who handed
in the letters.  There can’t be many at
a place like that.”

“Did they remember?”

“They remembered the letters
being given in distinctly, but as for knowing anything
beyond that, they were simply futile.  There was
an old woman in the shop, aged about three hundred
and ten, I should think.  I shouldn’t say
she had ever been very intelligent, but now she simply
gibbered.  I started off by laying out a shilling
on some poisonous-looking sweets.  I gave the
lot to a village kid when I got out.  I hope they
didn’t kill him.  Then, having scattered
ground-bait in that way, I lugged out the photographs,
mentioned the letters and the date they had been sent,
and asked her to weigh in and identify the sender.”

“Did she?”

“My dear chap, she identified
them all, one after the other.  The first was
one of Clowes.  She was prepared to swear on oath
that that was the chap who had sent the letters. 
Then I shot a photograph of you across the counter,
and doubts began to creep in.  She said she was
certain it was one of those two ‘la-ads’,
but couldn’t quite say which.  To keep her
amused I fired in photograph number three—­Allardyce’s. 
She identified that, too.  At the end of ten minutes
she was pretty sure that it was one of the six—­the
other three were Paget, Clephane, and Rand-Brown—­but
she was not going to bind herself down to any particular
one.  As I had come to the end of my stock of photographs,
and was getting a bit sick of the game, I got up to
go, when in came another ornament of Chesterton from
a room at the back of the shop.  He was quite
a kid, not more than a hundred and fifty at the outside,
so, as a last chance, I tackled him on the subject. 
He looked at the photographs for about half an hour,
mumbling something about it not being ’thiccy
‘un’ or ’that ‘un’, or
’that ’ere tother ‘un’, until
I began to feel I’d had enough of it.  Then
it came out that the real chap who had sent the letters
was a ‘la-ad’ with light hair, not so big
as me—­”

“That doesn’t help us much,” said
Trevor.

“—­And a ‘prarper
little gennlemun’.  So all we’ve got
to do is to look for some young duke of polished manners
and exterior, with a thatch of light hair.”

“There are three hundred and
sixty-seven fellows with light hair in the school,”
said Trevor, calmly.

“Thought it was three hundred
and sixty-eight myself,” said Milton, “but
I may be wrong.  Anyhow, there you have the results
of my investigations.  If you can make anything
out of them, you’re welcome to it.  Good-bye.”

“Half a second,” said
Trevor, as he got up; “had the fellow a cap of
any sort?”

“No.  Bareheaded.  You
wouldn’t expect him to give himself away by
wearing a house-cap?”

Trevor went over to the headmaster’s
revolving this discovery in his mind.  It was
not much of a clue, but the smallest clue is better
than nothing.  To find out that the sender of
the League letters had fair hair narrowed the search
down a little.  It cleared the more raven-locked
members of the school, at any rate.  Besides, by
combining his information with Milton’s, the
search might be still further narrowed down.  He
knew that the polite letter-writer must be either
in Seymour’s or in Donaldson’s.  The
number of fair-haired youths in the two houses was
not excessive.  Indeed, at the moment he could
not recall any; which rather complicated matters.

He arrived at the headmaster’s
door, and knocked.  He was shown into a room at
the side of the hall, near the door.  The butler
informed him that the headmaster was engaged at present. 
Trevor, who knew the butler slightly through having
constantly been to see the headmaster on business
via the front door, asked who was there.

“Sir Eustace Briggs,”
said the butler, and disappeared in the direction
of his lair beyond the green baize partition at the
end of the hall.

Trevor went into the room, which was
a sort of spare study, and sat down, wondering what
had brought the mayor of Wrykyn to see the headmaster
at this advanced hour.

A quarter of an hour later the sound
of voices broke in upon his peace.  The headmaster
was coming down the hall with the intention of showing
his visitor out.  The door of Trevor’s room
was ajar, and he could hear distinctly what was being
said.  He had no particular desire to play the
eavesdropper, but the part was forced upon him.

Sir Eustace seemed excited.

“It is far from being my habit,”
he was saying, “to make unnecessary complaints
respecting the conduct of the lads under your care.”
(Sir Eustace Briggs had a distaste for the shorter
and more colloquial forms of speech.  He would
have perished sooner than have substituted “complain
of your boys” for the majestic formula he had
used.  He spoke as if he enjoyed choosing his
words.  He seemed to pause and think before each
word.  Unkind people—­who were jealous
of his distinguished career—­used to say
that he did this because he was afraid of dropping
an aitch if he relaxed his vigilance.)

“But,” continued he, “I
am reluctantly forced to the unpleasant conclusion
that the dastardly outrage to which both I and the
Press of the town have called your attention is to
be attributed to one of the lads to whom I ’ave—­have
(this with a jerk) referred.”

“I will make a thorough inquiry,
Sir Eustace,” said the bass voice of the headmaster.

“I thank you,” said the
mayor.  “It would, under the circumstances,
be nothing more, I think, than what is distinctly
advisable.  The man Samuel Wapshott, of whose
narrative I have recently afforded you a brief synopsis,
stated in no uncertain terms that he found at the foot
of the statue on which the dastardly outrage was perpetrated
a diminutive ornament, in shape like the bats that
are used in the game of cricket.  This ornament,
he avers (with what truth I know not), was handed
by him to a youth of an age coeval with that of the
lads in the upper division of this school.  The
youth claimed it as his property, I was given to understand.”

“A thorough inquiry shall be made, Sir Eustace.”

“I thank you.”

And then the door shut, and the conversation ceased.

XX

THE FINDING OF THE BAT

Trevor waited till the headmaster
had gone back to his library, gave him five minutes
to settle down, and then went in.

The headmaster looked up inquiringly.

“My essay, sir,” said Trevor.

“Ah, yes.  I had forgotten.”

Trevor opened the notebook and began
to read what he had written.  He finished the
paragraph which owed its insertion to Clowes, and raced
hurriedly on to the next.  To his surprise the
flippancy passed unnoticed, at any rate, verbally. 
As a rule the headmaster preferred that quotations
from back numbers of Punch should be kept out
of the prefects’ English Essays.  And he
generally said as much.  But today he seemed strangely
preoccupied.  A split infinitive in paragraph five,
which at other times would have made him sit up in
his chair stiff with horror, elicited no remark. 
The same immunity was accorded to the insertion (inspired
by Clowes, as usual) of a popular catch phrase in
the last few lines.  Trevor finished with the feeling
that luck had favoured him nobly.

“Yes,” said the headmaster,
seemingly roused by the silence following on the conclusion
of the essay.  “Yes.”  Then, after
a long pause, “Yes,” again.

Trevor said nothing, but waited for further comment.

“Yes,” said the headmaster
once more, “I think that is a very fair essay. 
Very fair.  It wants a little more—­er—­not
quite so much—­um—­yes.”

Trevor made a note in his mind to
effect these improvements in future essays, and was
getting up, when the headmaster stopped him.

“Don’t go, Trevor.  I wish to speak
to you.”

Trevor’s first thought was,
perhaps naturally, that the bat was going to be brought
into discussion.  He was wondering helplessly how
he was going to keep O’Hara and his midnight
exploit out of the conversation, when the headmaster
resumed.  “An unpleasant thing has happened,
Trevor—­”

“Now we’re coming to it,” thought
Trevor.

“It appears, Trevor, that a
considerable amount of smoking has been going on in
the school.”

Trevor breathed freely once more. 
It was only going to be a mere conventional smoking
row after all.  He listened with more enjoyment
as the headmaster, having stopped to turn down the
wick of the reading-lamp which stood on the table
at his side, and which had begun, appropriately enough,
to smoke, resumed his discourse.

“Mr Dexter—­”

Of course, thought Trevor.  If
there ever was a row in the school, Dexter was bound
to be at the bottom of it.

“Mr Dexter has just been in
to see me.  He reported six boys.  He discovered
them in the vault beneath the junior block.  Two
of them were boys in your house.”

Trevor murmured something wordless,
to show that the story interested him.

“You knew nothing of this, of course—­”

“No, sir.”

“No.  Of course not. 
It is difficult for the head of a house to know all
that goes on in that house.”

Was this his beastly sarcasm? 
Trevor asked himself.  But he came to the conclusion
that it was not.  After all, the head of a house
is only human.  He cannot be expected to keep
an eye on the private life of every member of his
house.

“This must be stopped, Trevor. 
There is no saying how widespread the practice has
become or may become.  What I want you to do is
to go straight back to your house and begin a complete
search of the studies.”

“Tonight, sir?” It seemed too late for
such amusement.

“Tonight.  But before you
go to your house, call at Mr Seymour’s, and
tell Milton I should like to see him.  And, Trevor.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You will understand that I
am leaving this matter to you to be dealt with by
you.  I shall not require you to make any report
to me.  But if you should find tobacco in any
boy’s room, you must punish him well, Trevor. 
Punish him well.”

This meant that the culprit must be
“touched up” before the house assembled
in the dining-room.  Such an event did not often
occur.  The last occasion had been in Paget’s
first term as head of Donaldson’s, when two
of the senior day-room had been discovered attempting
to revive the ancient and dishonourable custom of
bullying.  This time, Trevor foresaw, would set
up a record in all probability.  There might be
any number of devotees of the weed, and he meant to
carry out his instructions to the full, and make the
criminals more unhappy than they had been since the
day of their first cigar.  Trevor hated the habit
of smoking at school.  He was so intensely keen
on the success of the house and the school at games,
that anything which tended to damage the wind and
eye filled him with loathing.  That anybody should
dare to smoke in a house which was going to play in
the final for the House Football Cup made him rage
internally, and he proposed to make things bad and
unrestful for such.

To smoke at school is to insult the
divine weed.  When you are obliged to smoke in
odd corners, fearing every moment that you will be
discovered, the whole meaning, poetry, romance of a
pipe vanishes, and you become like those lost beings
who smoke when they are running to catch trains. 
The boy who smokes at school is bound to come to a
bad end.  He will degenerate gradually into a
person that plays dominoes in the smoking-rooms of
A.B.C. shops with friends who wear bowler hats and
frock coats.

Much of this philosophy Trevor expounded
to Clowes in energetic language when he returned to
Donaldson’s after calling at Seymour’s
to deliver the message for Milton.

Clowes became quite animated at the
prospect of a real row.

“We shall be able to see the
skeletons in their cupboards,” he observed. 
“Every man has a skeleton in his cupboard, which
follows him about wherever he goes.  Which study
shall we go to first?”

“We?” said Trevor.

“We,” repeated Clowes
firmly.  “I am not going to be left out of
this jaunt.  I need bracing up—­I’m
not strong, you know—­and this is just the
thing to do it.  Besides, you’ll want a bodyguard
of some sort, in case the infuriated occupant turns
and rends you.”

“I don’t see what there
is to enjoy in the business,” said Trevor, gloomily. 
“Personally, I bar this kind of thing.  By
the time we’ve finished, there won’t be
a chap in the house I’m on speaking terms with.”

“Except me, dearest,”
said Clowes.  “I will never desert you. 
It’s of no use asking me, for I will never do
it.  Mr Micawber has his faults, but I will never
desert Mr Micawber.”

“You can come if you like,”
said Trevor; “we’ll take the studies in
order.  I suppose we needn’t look up the
prefects?”

“A prefect is above suspicion.  Scratch
the prefects.”

“That brings us to Dixon.”

Dixon was a stout youth with spectacles,
who was popularly supposed to do twenty-two hours’
work a day.  It was believed that he put in two
hours sleep from eleven to one, and then got up and
worked in his study till breakfast.

He was working when Clowes and Trevor
came in.  He dived head foremost into a huge Liddell
and Scott as the door opened.  On hearing Trevor’s
voice he slowly emerged, and a pair of round and spectacled
eyes gazed blankly at the visitors.  Trevor briefly
explained his errand, but the interview lost in solemnity
owing to the fact that the bare notion of Dixon storing
tobacco in his room made Clowes roar with laughter. 
Also, Dixon stolidly refused to understand what Trevor
was talking about, and at the end of ten minutes,
finding it hopeless to try and explain, the two went. 
Dixon, with a hazy impression that he had been asked
to join in some sort of round game, and had refused
the offer, returned again to his Liddell and Scott,
and continued to wrestle with the somewhat obscure
utterances of the chorus in AEschylus’ Agamemnon. 
The results of this fiasco on Trevor and Clowes were
widely different.  Trevor it depressed horribly. 
It made him feel savage.  Clowes, on the other
hand, regarded the whole affair in a spirit of rollicking
farce, and refused to see that this was a serious
matter, in which the honour of the house was involved.

The next study was Ruthven’s. 
This fact somewhat toned down the exuberances
of Clowes’s demeanour.  When one particularly
dislikes a person, one has a curious objection to
seeming in good spirits in his presence.  One
feels that he may take it as a sort of compliment to
himself, or, at any rate, contribute grins of his own,
which would be hateful.  Clowes was as grave as
Trevor when they entered the study.

Ruthven’s study was like himself,
overdressed and rather futile.  It ran to little
china ornaments in a good deal of profusion.  It
was more like a drawing-room than a school study.

“Sorry to disturb you, Ruthven,” said
Trevor.

“Oh, come in,” said Ruthven,
in a tired voice.  “Please shut the door;
there is a draught.  Do you want anything?”

“We’ve got to have a look round,”
said Clowes.

“Can’t you see everything there is?”

Ruthven hated Clowes as much as Clowes hated him.

Trevor cut into the conversation again.

“It’s like this, Ruthven,”
he said.  “I’m awfully sorry, but the
Old Man’s just told me to search the studies
in case any of the fellows have got baccy.”

Ruthven jumped up, pale with consternation.

“You can’t.  I won’t have you
disturbing my study.”

“This is rot,” said Trevor,
shortly, “I’ve got to.  It’s
no good making it more unpleasant for me than it is.”

“But I’ve no tobacco.  I swear I haven’t.”

“Then why mind us searching?” said Clowes
affably.

“Come on, Ruthven,” said
Trevor, “chuck us over the keys.  You might
as well.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t be an ass, man.”

“We have here,” observed
Clowes, in his sad, solemn way, “a stout and
serviceable poker.”  He stooped, as he spoke,
to pick it up.

“Leave that poker alone,” cried Ruthven.

Clowes straightened himself.

“I’ll swop it for your keys,” he
said.

“Don’t be a fool.”

“Very well, then.  We will now crack our
first crib.”

Ruthven sprang forward, but Clowes,
handing him off in football fashion with his left
hand, with his right dashed the poker against the lock
of the drawer of the table by which he stood.

The lock broke with a sharp crack. 
It was not built with an eye to such onslaught.

“Neat for a first shot,”
said Clowes, complacently.  “Now for the
Umustaphas and shag.”

But as he looked into the drawer he
uttered a sudden cry of excitement.  He drew something
out, and tossed it over to Trevor.

“Catch, Trevor,” he said
quietly.  “Something that’ll interest
you.”

Trevor caught it neatly in one hand,
and stood staring at it as if he had never seen anything
like it before.  And yet he had—­often. 
For what he had caught was a little golden bat, about
an inch long by an eighth of an inch wide.

XXI

THE LEAGUE REVEALED

“What do you think of that?” said Clowes.

Trevor said nothing.  He could
not quite grasp the situation.  It was not only
that he had got the idea so firmly into his head that
it was Rand-Brown who had sent the letters and appropriated
the bat.  Even supposing he had not suspected
Rand-Brown, he would never have dreamed of suspecting
Ruthven.  They had been friends.  Not very
close friends—­Trevor’s keenness for
games and Ruthven’s dislike of them prevented
that—­but a good deal more than acquaintances. 
He was so constituted that he could not grasp the
frame of mind required for such an action as Ruthven’s. 
It was something absolutely abnormal.

Clowes was equally surprised, but
for a different reason.  It was not so much the
enormity of Ruthven’s proceedings that took him
aback.  He believed him, with that cheerful intolerance
which a certain type of mind affects, capable of anything. 
What surprised him was the fact that Ruthven had had
the ingenuity and even the daring to conduct a campaign
of this description.  Cribbing in examinations
he would have thought the limit of his crimes. 
Something backboneless and underhand of that kind
would not have surprised him in the least.  He
would have said that it was just about what he had
expected all along.  But that Ruthven should blossom
out suddenly as quite an ingenious and capable criminal
in this way, was a complete surprise.

“Well, perhaps you’ll
make a remark?” he said, turning to Ruthven.

Ruthven, looking very much like a
passenger on a Channel steamer who has just discovered
that the motion of the vessel is affecting him unpleasantly,
had fallen into a chair when Clowes handed him off. 
He sat there with a look on his pasty face which was
not good to see, as silent as Trevor.  It seemed
that whatever conversation there was going to be would
have to take the form of a soliloquy from Clowes.

Clowes took a seat on the corner of the table.

“It seems to me, Ruthven,”
he said, “that you’d better say something. 
At present there’s a lot that wants explaining. 
As this bat has been found lying in your drawer, I
suppose we may take it that you’re the impolite
letter-writer?”

Ruthven found his voice at last.

“I’m not,” he cried; “I never
wrote a line.”

“Now we’re getting at
it,” said Clowes.  “I thought you couldn’t
have had it in you to carry this business through
on your own.  Apparently you’ve only been
the sleeping partner in this show, though I suppose
it was you who ragged Trevor’s study?  Not
much sleeping about that.  You took over the acting
branch of the concern for that day only, I expect. 
Was it you who ragged the study?”

Ruthven stared into the fire, but said nothing.

“Must be polite, you know, Ruthven,
and answer when you’re spoken to.  Was it
you who ragged Trevor’s study?”

“Yes,” said Ruthven.

“Thought so.”

“Why, of course, I met you just
outside,” said Trevor, speaking for the first
time.  “You were the chap who told me what
had happened.”

Ruthven said nothing.

“The ragging of the study seems
to have been all the active work he did,” remarked
Clowes.

“No,” said Trevor, “he
posted the letters, whether he wrote them or not. 
Milton was telling me—­you remember? 
I told you.  No, I didn’t.  Milton found
out that the letters were posted by a small, light-haired
fellow.”

“That’s him,” said
Clowes, as regardless of grammar as the monks of Rheims,
pointing with the poker at Ruthven’s immaculate
locks.  “Well, you ragged the study and
posted the letters.  That was all your share. 
Am I right in thinking Rand-Brown was the other partner?”

Silence from Ruthven.

“Am I?” persisted Clowes.

“You may think what you like.  I don’t
care.”

“Now we’re getting rude
again,” complained Clowes. “Was
Rand-Brown in this?”

“Yes,” said Ruthven.

“Thought so.  And who else?”

“No one.”

“Try again.”

“I tell you there was no one
else.  Can’t you believe a word a chap says?”

“A word here and there, perhaps,”
said Clowes, as one making a concession, “but
not many, and this isn’t one of them.  Have
another shot.”

Ruthven relapsed into silence.

“All right, then,” said
Clowes, “we’ll accept that statement. 
There’s just a chance that it may be true. 
And that’s about all, I think.  This isn’t
my affair at all, really.  It’s yours, Trevor. 
I’m only a spectator and camp-follower. 
It’s your business.  You’ll find me
in my study.”  And putting the poker carefully
in its place, Clowes left the room.  He went into
his study, and tried to begin some work.  But the
beauties of the second book of Thucydides failed to
appeal to him.  His mind was elsewhere.  He
felt too excited with what had just happened to translate
Greek.  He pulled up a chair in front of the fire,
and gave himself up to speculating how Trevor was
getting on in the neighbouring study.  He was
glad he had left him to finish the business.  If
he had been in Trevor’s place, there was nothing
he would so greatly have disliked as to have some
one—­however familiar a friend—­interfering
in his wars and settling them for him.  Left to
himself, Clowes would probably have ended the interview
by kicking Ruthven into the nearest approach to pulp
compatible with the laws relating to manslaughter. 
He had an uneasy suspicion that Trevor would let him
down far too easily.

The handle turned.  Trevor came
in, and pulled up another chair in silence.  His
face wore a look of disgust.  But there were no
signs of combat upon him.  The toe of his boot
was not worn and battered, as Clowes would have liked
to have seen it.  Evidently he had not chosen to
adopt active and physical measures for the improvement
of Ruthven’s moral well-being.

“Well?” said Clowes.

“My word, what a hound!” breathed Trevor,
half to himself.

“My sentiments to a hair,”
said Clowes, approvingly.  “But what have
you done?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t. 
Did he give any explanation?  What made him go
in for the thing at all?  What earthly motive could
he have for not wanting Barry to get his colours,
bar the fact that Rand-Brown didn’t want him
to?  And why should he do what Rand-Brown told
him?  I never even knew they were pals, before
today.”

“He told me a good deal,”
said Trevor.  “It’s one of the beastliest
things I ever heard.  They neither of them come
particularly well out of the business, but Rand-Brown
comes worse out of it even than Ruthven.  My word,
that man wants killing.”

“That’ll keep,” said Clowes, nodding. 
“What’s the yarn?”

“Do you remember about a year
ago a chap named Patterson getting sacked?”

Clowes nodded again.  He remembered
the case well.  Patterson had had gambling transactions
with a Wrykyn tradesman, had been found out, and had
gone.

“You remember what a surprise
it was to everybody.  It wasn’t one of those
cases where half the school suspects what’s going
on.  Those cases always come out sooner or later. 
But Patterson nobody knew about.”

“Yes.  Well?”

“Nobody,” said Trevor,
“except Ruthven, that is.  Ruthven got to
know somehow.  I believe he was a bit of a pal
of Patterson’s at the time.  Anyhow,—­they
had a row, and Ruthven went to Dexter—­Patterson
was in Dexter’s—­and sneaked. 
Dexter promised to keep his name out of the business,
and went straight to the Old Man, and Patterson got
turfed out on the spot.  Then somehow or other
Rand-Brown got to know about it—­I believe
Ruthven must have told him by accident some time or
other.  After that he simply had to do everything
Rand-Brown wanted him to.  Otherwise he said that
he would tell the chaps about the Patterson affair. 
That put Ruthven in a dead funk.”

“Of course,” said Clowes;
“I should imagine friend Ruthven would have
got rather a bad time of it.  But what made them
think of starting the League?  It was a jolly
smart idea.  Rand-Brown’s, of course?”

“Yes.  I suppose he’d
heard about it, and thought something might be made
out of it if it were revived.”

“And were Ruthven and he the only two in it?”

“Ruthven swears they were, and
I shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t telling
the truth, for once in his life.  You see, everything
the League’s done so far could have been done
by him and Rand-Brown, without anybody else’s
help.  The only other studies that were ragged
were Mill’s and Milton’s—­both
in Seymour’s.

“Yes,” said Clowes.

There was a pause.  Clowes put another shovelful
of coal on the fire.

“What are you going to do to Ruthven?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?  Hang it, he doesn’t
deserve to get off like that.  He isn’t as
bad as Rand-Brown—­quite—­but he’s
pretty nearly as finished a little beast as you could
find.”

“Finished is just the word,”
said Trevor.  “He’s going at the end
of the week.”

“Going?  What! sacked?”

“Yes.  The Old Man’s
been finding out things about him, apparently, and
this smoking row has just added the finishing-touch
to his discoveries.  He’s particularly keen
against smoking just now for some reason.”

“But was Ruthven in it?”

“Yes.  Didn’t I tell
you?  He was one of the fellows Dexter caught in
the vault.  There were two in this house, you
remember?”

“Who was the other?”

“That man Dashwood.  Has
the study next to Paget’s old one.  He’s
going, too.”

“Scarcely knew him.  What sort of a chap
was he?”

“Outsider.  No good to the house in any
way.  He won’t be missed.”

“And what are you going to do about Rand-Brown?”

“Fight him, of course.  What else could
I do?”

“But you’re no match for him.”

“We’ll see.”

“But you aren’t,”
persisted Clowes.  “He can give you a stone
easily, and he’s not a bad boxer either. 
Moriarty didn’t beat him so very cheaply in
the middle-weight this year.  You wouldn’t
have a chance.”

Trevor flared up.

“Heavens, man,” he cried,
“do you think I don’t know all that myself? 
But what on earth would you have me do?  Besides,
he may be a good boxer, but he’s got no pluck
at all.  I might outstay him.”

“Hope so,” said Clowes.

But his tone was not hopeful.

XXII

A DRESS REHEARSAL

Some people in Trevor’s place
might have taken the earliest opportunity of confronting
Rand-Brown, so as to settle the matter in hand without
delay.  Trevor thought of doing this, but finally
decided to let the matter rest for a day, until he
should have found out with some accuracy what chance
he stood.

After four o’clock, therefore,
on the next day, having had tea in his study, he went
across to the baths, in search of O’Hara. 
He intended that before the evening was over the Irishman
should have imparted to him some of his skill with
the hands.  He did not know that for a man absolutely
unscientific with his fists there is nothing so fatal
as to take a boxing lesson on the eve of battle. 
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  He is
apt to lose his recklessness—­which might
have stood by him well—­in exchange for
a little quite useless science.  He is neither
one thing nor the other, neither a natural fighter
nor a skilful boxer.

This point O’Hara endeavoured
to press upon him as soon as he had explained why
it was that he wanted coaching on this particular
afternoon.

The Irishman was in the gymnasium,
punching the ball, when Trevor found him.  He
generally put in a quarter of an hour with the punching-ball
every evening, before Moriarty turned up for the customary
six rounds.

“Want me to teach ye a few tricks?”
he said.  “What’s that for?”

“I’ve got a mill coming
on soon,” explained Trevor, trying to make the
statement as if it were the most ordinary thing in
the world for a school prefect, who was also captain
of football, head of a house, and in the cricket eleven,
to be engaged for a fight in the near future.

“Mill!” exclaimed O’Hara.  “You! 
An’ why?”

“Never mind why,” said
Trevor.  “I’ll tell you afterwards,
perhaps.  Shall I put on the gloves now?”

“Wait,” said O’Hara,
“I must do my quarter of an hour with the ball
before I begin teaching other people how to box. 
Have ye a watch?”

“Yes.”

“Then time me.  I’ll
do four rounds of three minutes each, with a minute’s
rest in between.  That’s more than I’ll
do at Aldershot, but it’ll get me fit. 
Ready?”

“Time,” said Trevor.

He watched O’Hara assailing
the swinging ball with considerable envy.  Why,
he wondered, had he not gone in for boxing?  Everybody
ought to learn to box.  It was bound to come in
useful some time or other.  Take his own case. 
He was very much afraid—­no, afraid was not
the right word, for he was not that.  He was very
much of opinion that Rand-Brown was going to have
a most enjoyable time when they met.  And the final
house-match was to be played next Monday.  If events
turned out as he could not help feeling they were
likely to turn out, he would be too battered to play
in that match.  Donaldson’s would probably
win whether he played or not, but it would be bitter
to be laid up on such an occasion.  On the other
hand, he must go through with it.  He did not
believe in letting other people take a hand in settling
his private quarrels.

But he wished he had learned to box. 
If only he could hit that dancing, jumping ball with
a fifth of the skill that O’Hara was displaying,
his wiriness and pluck might see him through. 
O’Hara finished his fourth round with his leathern
opponent, and sat down, panting.

“Pretty useful, that,” commented Trevor,
admiringly.

“Ye should see Moriarty,” gasped O’Hara.

“Now, will ye tell me why it
is you’re going to fight, and with whom you’re
going to fight?”

“Very well.  It’s with Rand-Brown.”

“Rand-Brown!” exclaimed O’Hara. 
“But, me dearr man, he’ll ate you.”

Trevor gave a rather annoyed laugh. 
“I must say I’ve got a nice, cheery, comforting
lot of friends,” he said.  “That’s
just what Clowes has been trying to explain to me.”

“Clowes is quite right,”
said O’Hara, seriously.  “Has the thing
gone too far for ye to back out?  Without climbing
down, of course,” he added.

“Yes,” said Trevor, “there’s
no question of my getting out of it.  I daresay
I could.  In fact, I know I could.  But I’m
not going to.”

“But, me dearr man, ye haven’t
an earthly chance.  I assure ye ye haven’t. 
I’ve seen Rand-Brown with the gloves on. 
That was last term.  He’s not put them on
since Moriarty bate him in the middles, so he may
be out of practice.  But even then he’d be
a bad man to tackle.  He’s big an’
he’s strong, an’ if he’d only had
the heart in him he’d have been going up to
Aldershot instead of Moriarty.  That’s what
he’d be doing.  An’ you can’t
box at all.  Never even had the gloves on.”

“Never.  I used to scrap when I was a kid,
though.”

“That’s no use,”
said O’Hara, decidedly.  “But you haven’t
said what it is that ye’ve got against Rand-Brown. 
What is it?”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t
tell you.  You’re in it as well.  In
fact, if it hadn’t been for the bat turning
up, you’d have been considerably more in it
than I am.”

“What!” cried O’Hara. 
“Where did you find it?  Was it in the grounds? 
When was it you found it?”

Whereupon Trevor gave him a very full
and exact account of what had happened.  He showed
him the two letters from the League, touched on Milton’s
connection with the affair, traced the gradual development
of his suspicions, and described with some approach
to excitement the scene in Ruthven’s study,
and the explanations that had followed it.

“Now do you wonder,” he
concluded, “that I feel as if a few rounds with
Rand-Brown would do me good.”

O’Hara breathed hard.

“My word!” he said, “I’d like
to see ye kill him.”

“But,” said Trevor, “as
you and Clowes have been pointing out to me, if there’s
going to be a corpse, it’ll be me.  However,
I mean to try.  Now perhaps you wouldn’t
mind showing me a few tricks.”

“Take my advice,” said O’Hara, “and
don’t try any of that foolery.”

“Why, I thought you were such
a believer in science,” said Trevor in surprise.

“So I am, if you’ve enough
of it.  But it’s the worst thing ye can do
to learn a trick or two just before a fight, if you
don’t know anything about the game already. 
A tough, rushing fighter is ten times as good as a
man who’s just begun to learn what he oughtn’t
to do.”

“Well, what do you advise me
to do, then?” asked Trevor, impressed by the
unwonted earnestness with which the Irishman delivered
this pugilistic homily, which was a paraphrase of
the views dinned into the ears of every novice by
the school instructor.

“I must do something.”

“The best thing ye can do,”
said O’Hara, thinking for a moment, “is
to put on the gloves and have a round or two with
me.  Here’s Moriarty at last.  We’ll
get him to time us.”

As much explanation as was thought
good for him having been given to the newcomer, to
account for Trevor’s newly-acquired taste for
things pugilistic, Moriarty took the watch, with instructions
to give them two minutes for the first round.

“Go as hard as you can,”
said O’Hara to Trevor, as they faced one another,
“and hit as hard as you like.  It won’t
be any practice if you don’t.  I sha’n’t
mind being hit.  It’ll do me good for Aldershot. 
See?”

Trevor said he saw.

“Time,” said Moriarty.

Trevor went in with a will.  He
was a little shy at first of putting all his weight
into his blows.  It was hard to forget that he
felt friendly towards O’Hara.  But he speedily
awoke to the fact that the Irishman took his boxing
very seriously, and was quite a different person when
he had the gloves on.  When he was so equipped,
the man opposite him ceased to be either friend or
foe in a private way.  He was simply an opponent,
and every time he hit him was one point.  And,
when he entered the ring, his only object in life
for the next three minutes was to score points. 
Consequently Trevor, sparring lightly and in rather
a futile manner at first, was woken up by a stinging
flush hit between the eyes.  After that he, too,
forgot that he liked the man before him, and rushed
him in all directions.  There was no doubt as to
who would have won if it had been a competition. 
Trevor’s guard was of the most rudimentary order,
and O’Hara got through when and how he liked. 
But though he took a good deal, he also gave a good
deal, and O’Hara confessed himself not altogether
sorry when Moriarty called “Time”.

“Man,” he said regretfully,
“why ever did ye not take up boxing before? 
Ye’d have made a splendid middle-weight.”

“Well, have I a chance, do you think?”
inquired Trevor.

“Ye might do it with luck,”
said O’Hara, very doubtfully.  “But,”
he added, “I’m afraid ye’ve not
much chance.”

And with this poor encouragement from
his trainer and sparring-partner, Trevor was forced
to be content.

XXIII

WHAT RENFORD SAW

The health of Master Harvey of Seymour’s
was so delicately constituted that it was an absolute
necessity that he should consume one or more hot buns
during the quarter of an hour’s interval which
split up morning school.  He was tearing across
the junior gravel towards the shop on the morning
following Trevor’s sparring practice with O’Hara,
when a melodious treble voice called his name. 
It was Renford.  He stopped, to allow his friend
to come up with him, and then made as if to resume
his way to the shop.  But Renford proposed an amendment. 
“Don’t go to the shop,” he said,
“I want to talk.”

“Well, can’t you talk in the shop?”

“Not what I want to tell you.  It’s
private.  Come for a stroll.”

Harvey hesitated.  There were
few things he enjoyed so much as exclusive items of
school gossip (scandal preferably), but hot new buns
were among those few things.  However, he decided
on this occasion to feed the mind at the expense of
the body.  He accepted Renford’s invitation.

“What is it?” he asked,
as they made for the football field.  “What’s
been happening?”

“It’s frightfully exciting,” said
Renford.

“What’s up?”

“You mustn’t tell any one.”

“All right.  Of course not.”

“Well, then, there’s been
a big fight, and I’m one of the only chaps who
know about it so far.”

“A fight?” Harvey became excited. 
“Who between?”

Renford paused before delivering his
news, to emphasise the importance of it.

“It was between O’Hara and Rand-Brown,”
he said at length.

“By Jove!” said
Harvey.  Then a suspicion crept into his mind.

“Look here, Renford,” he said, “if
you’re trying to green me—­”

“I’m not, you ass,”
replied Renford indignantly.  “It’s
perfectly true.  I saw it myself.”

“By Jove, did you really? 
Where was it?  When did it come off?  Was it
a good one?  Who won?”

“It was the best one I’ve ever seen.”

“Did O’Hara beat him?  I hope he did. 
O’Hara’s a jolly good sort.”

“Yes.  They had six rounds. 
Rand-Brown got knocked out in the middle of the sixth.”

“What, do you mean really knocked out, or did
he just chuck it?”

“No.  He was really knocked
out.  He was on the floor for quite a time. 
By Jove, you should have seen it.  O’Hara
was ripping in the sixth round.  He was all over
him.”

“Tell us about it,” said Harvey, and Renford
told.

“I’d got up early,”
he said, “to feed the ferrets, and I was just
cutting over to the fives-courts with their grub, when,
just as I got across the senior gravel, I saw O’Hara
and Moriarty standing waiting near the second court. 
O’Hara knows all about the ferrets, so I didn’t
try and cut or anything.  I went up and began talking
to him.  I noticed he didn’t look particularly
keen on seeing me at first.  I asked him if he
was going to play fives.  Then he said no, and
told me what he’d really come for.  He said
he and Rand-Brown had had a row, and they’d
agreed to have it out that morning in one of the fives-courts. 
Of course, when I heard that, I was all on to see
it, so I said I’d wait, if he didn’t mind. 
He said he didn’t care, so long as I didn’t
tell everybody, so I said I wouldn’t tell anybody
except you, so he said all right, then, I could stop
if I wanted to.  So that was how I saw it. 
Well, after we’d been waiting a few minutes,
Rand-Brown came in sight, with that beast Merrett
in our house, who’d come to second him. 
It was just like one of those duels you read about,
you know.  Then O’Hara said that as I was
the only one there with a watch—­he and Rand-Brown
were in footer clothes, and Merrett and Moriarty hadn’t
got their tickers on them—­I’d better
act as timekeeper.  So I said all right, I would,
and we went to the second fives-court.  It’s
the biggest of them, you know.  I stood outside
on the bench, looking through the wire netting over
the door, so as not to be in the way when they started
scrapping.  O’Hara and Rand-Brown took off
their blazers and sweaters, and chucked them to Moriarty
and Merrett, and then Moriarty and Merrett went and
stood in two corners, and O’Hara and Rand-Brown
walked into the middle and stood up to one another. 
Rand-Brown was miles the heaviest—­by a stone,
I should think—­and he was taller and had
a longer reach.  But O’Hara looked much
fitter.  Rand-Brown looked rather flabby.

“I sang out ‘Time’
through the wire netting, and they started off at
once.  O’Hara offered to shake hands, but
Rand-Brown wouldn’t.  So they began without
it.

“The first round was awfully
fast.  They kept having long rallies all over
the place.  O’Hara was a jolly sight quicker,
and Rand-Brown didn’t seem able to guard his
hits at all.  But he hit frightfully hard himself,
great, heavy slogs, and O’Hara kept getting them
in the face.  At last he got one bang in the mouth
which knocked him down flat.  He was up again
in a second, and was starting to rush, when I looked
at the watch, and found that I’d given them
nearly half a minute too much already.  So I shouted
‘Time’, and made up my mind I’d keep
more of an eye on the watch next round.  I’d
got so jolly excited, watching them, that I’d
forgot I was supposed to be keeping time for them. 
They had only asked for a minute between the rounds,
but as I’d given them half a minute too long
in the first round, I chucked in a bit extra in the
rest, so that they were both pretty fit by the time
I started them again.

“The second round was just like
the first, and so was the third.  O’Hara
kept getting the worst of it.  He was knocked down
three or four times more, and once, when he’d
rushed Rand-Brown against one of the walls, he hit
out and missed, and barked his knuckles jolly badly
against the wall.  That was in the middle of the
third round, and Rand-Brown had it all his own way
for the rest of the round—­for about two
minutes, that is to say.  He hit O’Hara
about all over the shop.  I was so jolly keen
on O’Hara’s winning, that I had half a
mind to call time early, so as to give him time to
recover.  But I thought it would be a low thing
to do, so I gave them their full three minutes.

“Directly they began the fourth
round, I noticed that things were going to change
a bit.  O’Hara had given up his rushing game,
and was waiting for his man, and when he came at him
he’d put in a hot counter, nearly always at
the body.  After a bit Rand-Brown began to get
cautious, and wouldn’t rush, so the fourth round
was the quietest there had been.  In the last
minute they didn’t hit each other at all. 
They simply sparred for openings.  It was in the
fifth round that O’Hara began to forge ahead. 
About half way through he got in a ripper, right in
the wind, which almost doubled Rand-Brown up, and
then he started rushing again.  Rand-Brown looked
awfully bad at the end of the round.  Round six
was ripping.  I never saw two chaps go for each
other so.  It was one long rally.  Then—­how
it happened I couldn’t see, they were so quick—­just
as they had been at it a minute and a half, there was
a crack, and the next thing I saw was Rand-Brown on
the ground, looking beastly.  He went down absolutely
flat; his heels and head touched the ground at the
same time.

“I counted ten out loud in the
professional way like they do at the National Sporting
Club, you know, and then said ‘O’Hara wins’. 
I felt an awful swell.  After about another half-minute,
Rand-Brown was all right again, and he got up and
went back to the house with Merrett, and O’Hara
and Moriarty went off to Dexter’s, and I gave
the ferrets their grub, and cut back to breakfast.”

“Rand-Brown wasn’t at breakfast,”
said Harvey.

“No.  He went to bed. 
I wonder what’ll happen.  Think there’ll
be a row about it?”

“Shouldn’t think so,”
said Harvey.  “They never do make rows about
fights, and neither of them is a prefect, so I don’t
see what it matters if they do fight. 
But, I say—­”

“What’s up?”

“I wish,” said Harvey,
his voice full of acute regret, “that it had
been my turn to feed those ferrets.”

“I don’t,” said
Renford cheerfully.  “I wouldn’t have
missed that mill for something.  Hullo, there’s
the bell.  We’d better run.”

When Trevor called at Seymour’s
that afternoon to see Rand-Brown, with a view to challenging
him to deadly combat, and found that O’Hara had
been before him, he ought to have felt relieved. 
His actual feeling was one of acute annoyance. 
It seemed to him that O’Hara had exceeded the
limits of friendship.  It was all very well for
him to take over the Rand-Brown contract, and settle
it himself, in order to save Trevor from a very bad
quarter of an hour, but Trevor was one of those people
who object strongly to the interference of other people
in their private business.  He sought out O’Hara
and complained.  Within two minutes O’Hara’s
golden eloquence had soothed him and made him view
the matter in quite a different light.  What O’Hara
pointed out was that it was not Trevor’s affair
at all, but his own.  Who, he asked, had been
likely to be damaged most by Rand-Brown’s manoeuvres
in connection with the lost bat?  Trevor was bound
to admit that O’Hara was that person.  Very
well, then, said O’Hara, then who had a better
right to fight Rand-Brown?  And Trevor confessed
that no one else had a better.

“Then I suppose,” he said,
“that I shall have to do nothing about it?”

“That’s it,” said O’Hara.

“It’ll be rather beastly
meeting the man after this,” said Trevor, presently. 
“Do you think he might possibly leave at the
end of term?”

“He’s leaving at the end
of the week,” said O’Hara.  “He
was one of the fellows Dexter caught in the vault
that evening.  You won’t see much more of
Rand-Brown.”

“I’ll try and put up with that,”
said Trevor.

“And so will I,” replied
O’Hara.  “And I shouldn’t think
Milton would be so very grieved.”

“No,” said Trevor. 
“I tell you what will make him sick, though,
and that is your having milled with Rand-Brown. 
It’s a job he’d have liked to have taken
on himself.”

XXIV

CONCLUSION

Into the story at this point comes
the narrative of Charles Mereweather Cook, aged fourteen,
a day-boy.

Cook arrived at the school on the
tenth of March, at precisely nine o’clock, in
a state of excitement.

He said there was a row on in the town.

Cross-examined, he said there was no end of a row
on in the town.

During morning school he explained
further, whispering his tale into the attentive ear
of Knight of the School House, who sat next to him.

What sort of a row, Knight wanted to know.

Cook deposed that he had been riding
on his bicycle past the entrance to the Recreation
Grounds on his way to school, when his eye was attracted
by the movements of a mass of men just inside the gate. 
They appeared to be fighting.  Witness did not
stop to watch, much as he would have liked to do so. 
Why not?  Why, because he was late already, and
would have had to scorch anyhow, in order to get to
school in time.  And he had been late the day
before, and was afraid that old Appleby (the master
of the form) would give him beans if he were late again. 
Wherefore he had no notion of what the men were fighting
about, but he betted that more would be heard about
it.  Why?  Because, from what he saw of it,
it seemed a jolly big thing.  There must have been
quite three hundred men fighting. (Knight, satirically,
“Pile it on!”) Well, quite a hundred,
anyhow.  Fifty a side.  And fighting like
anything.  He betted there would be something about
it in the Wrykyn Patriot tomorrow. 
He shouldn’t wonder if somebody had been killed. 
What were they scrapping about?  How should he
know!

Here Mr Appleby, who had been trying
for the last five minutes to find out where the whispering
noise came from, at length traced it to its source,
and forthwith requested Messrs Cook and Knight to do
him two hundred lines, adding that, if he heard them
talking again, he would put them into the extra lesson. 
Silence reigned from that moment.

Next day, while the form was wrestling
with the moderately exciting account of Caesar’s
doings in Gaul, Master Cook produced from his pocket
a newspaper cutting.  This, having previously planted
a forcible blow in his friend’s ribs with an
elbow to attract the latter’s attention, he
handed to Knight, and in dumb show requested him to
peruse the same.  Which Knight, feeling no interest
whatever in Caesar’s doings in Gaul, and having,
in consequence, a good deal of time on his hands,
proceeded to do.  The cutting was headed “Disgraceful
Fracas”, and was written in the elegant style
that was always so marked a feature of the Wrykyn
Patriot.

“We are sorry to have to report,”
it ran, “another of those deplorable ebullitions
of local Hooliganism, to which it has before now been
our painful duty to refer.  Yesterday the Recreation
Grounds were made the scene of as brutal an exhibition
of savagery as has ever marred the fair fame of this
town.  Our readers will remember how on a previous
occasion, when the fine statue of Sir Eustace Briggs
was found covered with tar, we attributed the act
to the malevolence of the Radical section of the community. 
Events have proved that we were right.  Yesterday
a body of youths, belonging to the rival party, was
discovered in the very act of repeating the offence. 
A thick coating of tar had already been administered,
when several members of the rival faction appeared. 
A free fight of a peculiarly violent nature immediately
ensued, with the result that, before the police could
interfere, several of the combatants had received severe
bruises.  Fortunately the police then arrived
on the scene, and with great difficulty succeeded
in putting a stop to the fracas.  Several
arrests were made.

“We have no desire to discourage
legitimate party rivalry, but we feel justified in
strongly protesting against such dastardly tricks as
those to which we have referred.  We can assure
our opponents that they can gain nothing by such conduct.”

There was a good deal more to the
effect that now was the time for all good men to come
to the aid of the party, and that the constituents
of Sir Eustace Briggs must look to it that they failed
not in the hour of need, and so on.  That was
what the Wrykyn Patriot had to say on the subject.

O’Hara managed to get hold of
a copy of the paper, and showed it to Clowes and Trevor.

“So now,” he said, “it’s
all right, ye see.  They’ll never suspect
it wasn’t the same people that tarred the statue
both times.  An’ ye’ve got the bat
back, so it’s all right, ye see.”

“The only thing that’ll
trouble you now,” said Clowes, “will be
your conscience.”

O’Hara intimated that he would try and put up
with that.

“But isn’t it a stroke
of luck,” he said, “that they should have
gone and tarred Sir Eustace again so soon after Moriarty
and I did it?”

Clowes said gravely that it only showed
the force of good example.

“Yes.  They wouldn’t
have thought of it, if it hadn’t been for us,”
chortled O’Hara.  “I wonder, now, if
there’s anything else we could do to that statue!”
he added, meditatively.

“My good lunatic,” said
Clowes, “don’t you think you’ve done
almost enough for one term?”

“Well, ’myes,”
replied O’Hara thoughtfully, “perhaps we
have, I suppose.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The term wore on.  Donaldson’s
won the final house-match by a matter of twenty-six
points.  It was, as they had expected, one of the
easiest games they had had to play in the competition. 
Bryant’s, who were their opponents, were not
strong, and had only managed to get into the final
owing to their luck in drawing weak opponents for the
trial heats.  The real final, that had decided
the ownership of the cup, had been Donaldson’s
v. Seymour’s.

Aldershot arrived, and the sports. 
Drummond and O’Hara covered themselves with
glory, and brought home silver medals.  But Moriarty,
to the disappointment of the school, which had counted
on his pulling off the middles, met a strenuous gentleman
from St Paul’s in the final, and was prematurely
outed in the first minute of the third round. 
To him, therefore, there fell but a medal of bronze.

It was on the Sunday after the sports
that Trevor’s connection with the bat ceased—­as
far, that is to say, as concerned its unpleasant character
(as a piece of evidence that might be used to his
disadvantage).  He had gone to supper with the
headmaster, accompanied by Clowes and Milton. 
The headmaster nearly always invited a few of the
house prefects to Sunday supper during the term. 
Sir Eustace Briggs happened to be there.  He had
withdrawn his insinuations concerning the part supposedly
played by a member of the school in the matter of the
tarred statue, and the headmaster had sealed the entente
cordiale by asking him to supper.

An ordinary man might have considered
it best to keep off the delicate subject.  Not
so Sir Eustace Briggs.  He was on to it like glue. 
He talked of little else throughout the whole course
of the meal.

“My suspicions,” he boomed,
towards the conclusion of the feast, “which
have, I am rejoiced to say, proved so entirely void
of foundation and significance, were aroused in the
first instance, as I mentioned before, by the narrative
of the man Samuel Wapshott.”

Nobody present showed the slightest
desire to learn what the man Samuel Wapshott had had
to say for himself, but Sir Eustace, undismayed, continued
as if the whole table were hanging on his words.

“The man Samuel Wapshott,”
he said, “distinctly asserted that a small gold
ornament, shaped like a bat, was handed by him to a
lad of age coeval with these lads here.”

The headmaster interposed.  He
had evidently heard more than enough of the man Samuel
Wapshott.

“He must have been mistaken,”
he said briefly.  “The bat which Trevor is
wearing on his watch-chain at this moment is the only
one of its kind that I know of.  You have never
lost it, Trevor?”

Trevor thought for a moment. He
had never lost it.  He replied diplomatically,
“It has been in a drawer nearly all the term,
sir,” he said.

“A drawer, hey?” remarked
Sir Eustace Briggs.  “Ah!  A very sensible
place to keep it in, my boy.  You could have no
better place, in my opinion.”

And Trevor agreed with him, with the
mental reservation that it rather depended on whom
the drawer belonged to.