“Can’t. Catechism to learn, thanks to Stone.”
“Oh, yes, so you have. I expect you wouldn’t be able to hold a bat either. Never mind, buck up. All the same in a hundred years. Besides, Hughes was caned two mornings running last year, and he didn’t blub even at the second helping.”
The goat-like Bags entered at this moment.
“I say, rough luck,” he said to David. “I warned you as soon as I saw Glanders. Found the Monarch yet?”
This was rather too much. David felt suddenly sure that Bags was at the bottom of all his misfortunes, and, already goaded by high-spirited sympathy, turned on him.
“No, I haven’t,” he shouted; “and I’m jolly well going to search your cubicle. I believe you stole him. Look here, you chaps, I believe Bags took the Monarch, and I believe he saw Glanders coming when I was talking to him, and didn’t warn me.”
Stone took his brown head out of the towel in which he had been rubbing it.
“Why? What evidence?” he asked.
“Unless you’re too blooming omniscient to want evidence,” said Bags.
“Because you’re a sneak. Because I jolly well hurt you last night, and you said I hadn’t to put me off the scent,” said David with a sudden inspiration. “Why, you’ve got a bruise as big as a football,” he cried, pointing to the injured part of Bags’s anatomy, “and yet you said it didn’t hurt. It must have hurt: it’s all rot to say it didn’t. And you said it was pax in order to put me off the look-out.”