“Well, isn't that what it was?” the detective asked, smiling.
Tavernake shrugged his shoulders.
“There didn't seem to me to be much joke about it!” he exclaimed.
Pritchard laughed gayly.
“You are not used to Americans, my young friend,” he said. “Over on this side you are all so fearfully literal. You are not seriously supposing that they meant to dose me with that stuff the other night, eh?”
“I never thought that there was any doubt about it at all,” Tavernake declared deliberately.
Pritchard stroked his moustache meditatively.
“Well,” he remarked, “you are certainly green, and yet I don't know why you shouldn't be. Americans are always up to games of that sort. I am not saying that they didn't mean to give me a scare, if they could, or that they wouldn't have been glad to get a few words of information out of me, or a paper or two that I keep pretty safely locked up. It would have been a better joke on me then. But as for the rest, as for really trying to make me take that stuff, of course, that was all bunkum.”
Tavernake sat quite still in his chair for several minutes.
“Will you take another gin fizz, Mr. Pritchard?” he asked.