This was all the other wanted.
“Exactly,” he retorted. “But if I’m in a position to know, I’m in a position not to tell. See?”
There was a laugh, in which the offender, who at first looked resentful, joined.
“What’s the joke?” asked James, who at that moment entered.
“Joke? Oh, Slingsby’s putting up idiotic questions,” answered Hallam shortly. “Here, Mabule,” to the Bar-keeper, “set ’em up again—you know every one’s pet poison. What’s yours, Mr Denham? You’ll join?”
“Thanks. All right,” answered Denham, who had come to the conclusion that the hospitality of this club required a strong head, which, fortunately, he possessed. But Harry Stride, less fortunate, did not.
“I can tell you all about that yarn,” he broke in. “Slingsby’s not so wide of the mark either. Some one has come to grief in the Makanya, and a white man too, for I picked up a saddle in the Bobi drift, and it had a bullet hole through the flap, an unmistakable bullet hole.”
“You picked it up?” said some one, while Inspector James, who was “in the know,” muttered to himself, “Damned silly young ass!”
Then followed a considerable amount of questionings and discussion. When was this, and where, and how would it have happened, and what had he done with the saddle, and so forth? Hallam, it might have been noticed, stood out of the discussion altogether. Perhaps he was “in the know” also; at any rate, as an official, he was instinctively averse to making public property of this kind of thing. But Harry Stride had got outside of quite as many whiskies-and-sodas as were good for him, and the effect, coming on top of his then state of frothy mental tension, was disastrous. Now he said—
“You must have crossed just above the Bobi drift, Mr Denham. I hear you came through the Makanya that way.”