“Of course we shall get into a row,” Chips admitted, cruelly; “but I shouldn’t call it a very rotten one, myself. It would be far rottener to try to avoid one now, and it might get us into a far worse row.”
Evan snorted an incoherent disclaimer, to the general effect that the consequences were of course the very last consideration with him, at all events so far as his own skin went. He was quite ready to stand the racket, though he had been against the beastly haunted house from the first, and it was rather hard luck on him. But what he seemed to feel still more strongly was the hard luck on all their people, if the three of them had to give evidence at an inquest, and the whole thing got into the papers.
Chips felt that he would rather enjoy that part, but he did not say so, and Jan still preserved a Delphic silence.
“Besides,” added Devereux, returning rather suddenly to his original ground, “I’m blowed if I myself could swear I’d ever seen the body.”
“You wouldn’t,” remarked Jan, sympathetically. “You didn’t have a good enough look.”
“Yet you saw enough to make you bolt,” said that offensive Chips, and opened all the dampers of Evan’s natural heat.
“It wasn’t what I saw, my good fool!” he cried angrily. “You know as well as I do what it was like up there. That’s the only reason I cleared out.”
“Well, there you are!” said Jan, grinning aloft on his rail.
“Then you agree with Carpenter, do you, that it’s our duty to go in and report the whole thing, and get a licking for our pains?”
Carpenter laughed satirically at the “licking,” but refrained from speech. He knew of old that Evan’s horror of the rod was on a par with the ordinary citizen’s horror of gaol. And he could not help wanting Jan to know it—but Jan did.