“To lick him?”
Fowle smacked his lips again.
“He’s brought it on himself.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll give the message. You can go back and tell Bray you’ve told me.”
“I’d rather have done it myself,” said Fowle, regretfully, as though he was being robbed of tuck.
“Well, you won’t,” I answered him, being pretty sick with the worm of a chap by that time. “You go back and say that Corkey will turn up in ten minutes.”
Then he cleared out reluctantly, leaving this tremendous responsibility entirely on my hands.
II
I went off there and then for Corkey. It’s a bit of a jar for a chap to get a message like that unexpectedly, and I didn’t know what advice to give. Corkey major was no good. If I’d told him he would have blinked through his goggles and have said some bosh--very likely in Latin. And Corkey minor, being thousands of miles away, it looked blue, because you can’t ask anybody but a chap’s own brothers to take up a matter like this. I couldn’t lick Bray myself, or I would have.
The next minute I met Corkey himself, and, from an awful rum look about him, I thought for a moment he’d had the licking already. But he hadn’t, and before I could speak he said: