"Right!" shouted Geoffrey. "And I wonder—oh, oh, I hurt!—I wonder whether he will do steps round Cavendish Square to-night, playing on it!"
Harry had begun to drink his tea a moment too soon.
They smoked a cigarette in the hall, Geoffrey eager to be off; Harry, contrary to his habit, strangely inclined to loiter. Their talk had veered to the more serious subject of shooting, and Harry was expressing his old-fashioned preference for a gun with hammers to the more usual hammerless.
"I can't think why I do prefer it," he said, "but there it is. I put a gun at half cock instinctively if I have to jump a ditch, but I do not feel quite at home with that little disk uncovering 'safe.' Supposing it shouldn't be? Come along, Geoff; we'll start, as you are in such a hurry. The men meet us at the lodge: we'll just get our guns and go!"
They went down the stone-flagged passage to the gun room, which looked out on the box hedge. There were two guns lying on the table, and Geoffrey, after looking at the other, took up his own.
"You're a consistent chap," he said to Harry. "After all you tell me of your preference for hammers, you shoot apparently with a hammerless."
Harry picked up the gun and looked at it.
"Not mine," he said; "Uncle Francis's. Ah! there's mine."
Another gun with hammers was leaning nearly upright in a rough gun stand, more like a stand for sticks, in the corner. Harry took hold of it some halfway up the barrels, and then seemed to Geoffrey to give a little jerk as if it had stuck. On the moment there was a loud explosion, a horrible raking scratch was torn in the wooden panelling of the wall, and an irregular hole opened in the ceiling. The charge could not have missed Harry by more than three inches, but he stood there, the smoking gun in his hand, without a tremor. Then he turned to Geoffrey.
"The Luck is waking up," he said. "Frost yesterday—that was the ice house; and this looks awfully like fire."