Well, the result was a knock-down blow to us all, as you may imagine, and the Doctor showed himself both wily and beastly, as usual. For he merely asked Protheroe's mother to send back the prize at the beginning of the term, as he fancied there might have been some mistake; but he begged her not to mention the matter to Protheroe minimus.
So when Protheroe and Mayne and myself all arrived again for the arduous toil of the winter term, and Mayne and I were eager for the financial disimbursements to begin, we heard the shattering news that, at the last moment, Protheroe hadn't got his fiver.
It was to have been given to him on the day that he came back to school; but instead his mother had merely told him that she feared there was a little mistake somewhere, and that she couldn't give him his hard-earned cash till Dr. Dunston had cleared the matter up.
Needless to say that Dunston did clear it up with all the brutality of which he was capable.
As for myself, when the crash came, I hoped it would happen to me as it often does to professional financiers in real life, and that I should escape, as it were. Not, of course, that I had done anything that in fairness made it necessary for me to escape, because to take advantage of supply and demand is a natural law of self-preservation, and everybody does it as a matter of course, not only financiers.
But, much to my annoyance, the common-sense view of the thing was not taken, and I found myself "in the cart," as they say, with young Mayne and Protheroe minimus.
The Doctor, on examining Protheroe's prize for calisthenics, instantly perceived that it was in reality young Mayne's prize for literature. But evidently anything like strategy of this kind was very distasteful to the Doctor. In fact, he took a prejudiced view from the first, and as young Mayne was only eleven and Protheroe min. merely ten and a half, it instantly jumped to Dunston's hateful and suspicious mind that somebody must have helped them in what he called a "nefarious project." And, by dint of some very unmanly cross-questioning, he got my name out of Mayne.
I never blamed Mayne; in fact, I quite believed him when he swore that it only slipped out under the treacherous questions of the Doctor; but the result was, of course, unsatisfactory in every way for me.
I was immediately sent for, and had no course open to me but to explain the whole nature of financial operations to Dr. Dunston, and try to make him see that I had simply fallen in with the iron laws of supply and demand.
Needless to say, I failed, for he was in one of his fiery and snorting conditions and above all appeal to reason.